Conversion Experiences
by Dwimordene
Summary: A pacifist walks into the recruiting station - and gets accepted. Now what's he supposed to do? The story of Ratchet becoming a combat-medic. Also features Jazz, Optimus, and Wheeljack.
1. Introduction

**Author's notes:** I started this story back in 2009, I think. It's premised on a notion I picked up early in my TF 2K7 life, namely that Ratchet originally is a pacifist (I think I read it on Wikipedia while trying to get specs on his model – please don't kill me! I try to put that to some decent story-telling use, canon or not). I've gotten through a couple of iterations, right up until a common sticking point, which I'm trying to decide if I can actually get around or not.

So why post it? Well, mostly for fun. Despite the being-stuckness, I'm fairly happy with what I've written so far. A lot of this story is tied up around different conceptual points having to do with design versus chosen purpose, plus a lot of exercising of my visual imagination – I will give the Bay!formers team credit where credit is due: their transformation sequences were awesome, and I wanted more of that awesome robot physiology and aesthetic built into a story. I'm hopeful this has enough of that, and is decent enough in the character interaction to be entertaining for those who like this type of story, which is built around trying to expand on a concept.

P.S. - When I began writing this, the third installment hadn't come out yet, so none of this is compatible with Sentinel's arc in the movies. I elected not to try to change things to fit DoTM.

 **Conversion Experiences**

The city was rusting. Bombed out and broken walls, stained with acid and carbon scoring, formed canyons of dead steel and stone. Glass and wires rose jaggedly against a grey sky, and plunged down into the depths of the earth where the drones flew their sweeps 'til their lights flickered and were lost. Through the ruins, forms moved stealthily amid the remains of civilization. They crept towards each other on different levels, skirting gaps and hugging walls, damping down on signals each time a drone passed, and the grey dust that coated them muted their colors, seeming intent upon reducing them to the same desperate estate.

At a certain point, there was a pause in that movement. Signals flowed back and forth among them – some electronic, some simply hand signals; everything seemed to stand still for a long, anxious moment.

Then the air erupted in a chaos of noise and light and gunfire. Ceilings fell, and floors collapsed; walls shuddered and cabling sparked. The dust rose swiftly to cloud the killing field, and shifting silhouettes, illuminated at times by the explosive flash of weaponry, darted through the haze as engines droned and metal squealed. Laser targeting scattered, the drones began to add their fire, and the air began to heat up: static crackled, but bodies were falling, especially as distances closed and opponents got within arm's reach of each other.

In the swirl and chaos, one of the figures, who had held back for the most part, flattened against a wall, suddenly darted in. Dodging fire, he skidded the last little distance on his knees, and then crouched to make as small a target as he could as he hastily bent over a downed comrade. Said comrade groaned, waving feeble protest, but the other simply pressed his hand down and opened a panel, fussing over a red-lit casualty simulator tag that had been wired into the 'bot.

"You're not supposed to – " the prone form hissed, but was cut off:

"Let somebody else take the fall today for being first down. Besides," the other announced, as he quickly sealed an armor panel once more, "it's done. You want to waste it?"

The other growled, but was quick to scramble up and disappear back into the melee. His savior, mean time, scanned the area, found his next target and, half-crouching, sprinted, throwing himself down at the last moment to duck under a brief spray of bullets, as someone crashed through the ceiling to try to flank the squad.

"Primus!" the object of his mercy cursed and quailed as a simulated plasma arc made the air ripple. "You're not – "

 _Everyone keeps saying this. You think I don't know?_ the other snapped over the com-line, locating the tag's interface. A quick bit of reprogramming and – "You're good to go – so get!"

Muttering, the recently downed soldier rolled away, transformed into vehicular mode, and shot forward into the fray, leaving his savior cycling dust behind the barriers. He scanned the firefight quickly, located the next 'bot by the 'disabled' signal, and with a rev of his engine, plunged once more into the chaos after his brothers.

It was a relatively swift battle, and lopsided, and when at the end of it, the opponents faced each other in two lines, the heavy-treaded sergeant stalked between them, noting which of his squad bore safety tags illumined with the dull, angry red light that said 'fatal damage' or the amber glow of injury. There were rather a lot more red lights on one side, and while there were probably no more 'blue' lights on one side as on the other, one team had markedly more amber ones.

"Would anyone care to speculate as to what happened today?" the sergeant growled. There was a long silence, save for the agitated, uncomfortable click and whir of shifting internal parts. Then:

"Medical interference," someone from the end of the line volunteered, sounding resentful. The soldier in question bore a red-lit tag, and he glared at the medic, whose tag was still a bright blue. The sergeant didn't dignify that with a reprimand; instead, he lunged, grabbed the speaker, and rammed a hand between armor plating. The soldier squawked, undertones flaring in pain, and his eyes flickered.

"Don't let me hear you blame somebody for your own failure," the sergeant said mildly. "You got your converter shot to scrap, according to the med-link. Now that you have a notion of what that might feel like – " his captive emitted a pained little trill of assent " – I trust you won't walk right into somebody's sights again."

"No, sergeant!"

Satisfied, the sergeant released him to stand unsteadily in his line. Turning, he glared at the rest, then said: "I don't want to see this happen again – formation, Jerries, and communication. I didn't see much of either worth speaking of. Dismissed!"

There was a mass groaning of hydraulics and engines as weary 'bots broke formation and began the trek back to the main ground vehicle tubes, heading for the washracks and the commons back on the base, which lay outside the central and still functional city node of Iacon. But: "Doctor."

One of the figures, a vibrant chartreuse dulled to an unattractive dusty yellow-green pallor, stopped, and just stood there, waiting until the sergeant caught up with him. Engine growling, the sergeant circled round, scanned the medic, then reached and tapped the tag.

"Not a mark on you that can't be worked out with some polish," he observed. "Guess you've learned to dodge."

"Preventable injuries are professional anathema, sergeant," was the quiet response.

"Mm." Quick as lightning, the sergeant had a hand through a breach in the medic's armor, and the medic went rigid, then arched in agony as sharp-clawed fingers scraped along something that hadn't been designed to bear that kind of attention quietly. Barrage, for that was his name, tightened his lock on the 'bot, holding him upright now. "You know all of you have to turn in your safety cartridges after every exercise. If I look at your equipment, am I going to find a full cartridge?"

There was a hesitation, and Barrage frowned, then scraped a little harder. "I don't like to repeat myself," he warned.

"Yes, sergeant," came the thin-toned reply.

"'Yes, sergeant,' what?" he prompted.

"Yes, sergeant... I understand that you don't care to repeat yourself!" the other managed, ending in a new pentave as Barrage worked his claws in just a little more. Barrage gave a disapproving rumble, but released the medic, save to brace him when he sagged rather alarmingly. But the medic did not collapse, and so after a moment or two, Barrage stepped back, engine rumbling softly.

"Form up," he ordered, and when the other just stared dumbly at him, he vented audibly, reached, grabbed the appropriate arm by wrist and elbow and positioned the other himself. "Form up!" he snapped again.

The medic did not quite vent – he had learned his lesson the first time – but it was with manifest reluctance that he bowed his head, gathered himself, and then shifted to form his gun.

Barrage watched parts slide and rearrange. It took several seconds, but eventually he completed the transformation and stood there, aiming at nothing. The sergeant would've bet that the 'bot hadn't even bothered to bring up targeting. He scanned the weapon, noting the close integration of non-standard equipment with his model – top line work, minimal alteration of form and mass, which was hardly unusual. Medics knew their own models and needs best after all. Barrage growled, revving his engine as he stalked down the length of the other's arm, then stopped and turned to face the medic, standing directly in front of the barrel of the gun. For a moment, the other held steady. But then, the muzzle dipped just a bit, and with a disgusted noise, Barrage swatted it aside, unsurprised that by the time the arm hung loosely at the 'bot's side, he'd reformed already _._

"You didn't fire a single round today," he stated.

The other lifted his head slightly. "No, sergeant."

"You didn't even fake it and form a meter, either – go through the medical motions. You just neutralized the tag's connection to your comrades' neural lines and reprogrammed it." The medic said nothing this time, just stared straight back. Barrage considered him a moment longer, reached then once more and caught the other's wrist, scanning the armature there, and he pressed down against a tensor line. His victim twitched noticeably, air hissing through his vents. The sergeant immediately released him.

For a long while, the two of them stood staring at each other. But then, rather to the surprise of them both, Barrage folded his arms just under his chassis, lowering his gaze to the earth. And: "You're dismissed," he said shortly, after a moment. "Turn in your safety cartridge and refuel."

Sensing his mood, the medic wisely made no reply, just flashed the required salute, turned, and began walking.

Barrage stood and did not quite stare after the retreating 'bot, waiting until the other's form had dwindled in the distance before he vented softly. _Blasted idiot's not gonna last a single slagging day out there!_ It was a waste, was what it was, and he hated it, and resented the idea that it was going to be on his head when the 'bot came up against Decepticons who wouldn't see him as anything but a fragging neon target. Engine revving in frustration, Barrage shook his head, and then he, too, quit the practice grounds.

"Hey – it's the Sarge's favorite Jerry!"

The chorus of clicks and ambivalent whirs sang familiar counterpart to the greeting, and Ratchet, preoccupied as he was, nevertheless suppressed an auditory grimace of his own as he headed straight for the high pressure wash rack to get rid of the dust.

There was a line – he wasn't _that_ late coming in – and so he composed himself to wait, ignoring as best he could the looks from his squad mates. "So," asked one, irritated undertones clashing with the mildness of his primaries, "how'd it go? You limpin' or anything?"

"Leave off, Torqueline," someone else groaned.

"I'm just showin' concern, here," Torqueline protested. "Third time this week the Sarge has had our squad medic under the gun, as it were. He's _our_ slagging squadron brother. Think maybe you'd want to make sure he's got all his parts, Amtek."

"I'm sure he would've said something if he didn't." Amtek gave Torqueline a placid look that nevertheless managed to convey his disapproval.

"There's more than one way to say something," the other 'bot replied, turning suddenly on Ratchet. "Arm bothering you again?"

Ratchet, who had been only half-consciously running microscanners over his forearm, deliberately finished the scan, then folded his arms under his chassis. "I'm fine, thank you," he replied mildly.

"He's fine," Amtek repeated, and gave Torqueline a pointed stare. Torqueline cycled his vents, blowing dust.

"Sure he is. That's why the Sarge wants a word with him – he's fine. We're all fine here, eh?" This last was addressed to the squad at large, and got a number of laughs, some forced, some free, all rife with irony. War instilled in its warriors its own peculiar sense of humor, even among the trainee Jerries.

At least it seemed to dispel tension somewhat, and as Torqueline fell in with a friend, attention drifted elsewhere since the possibility of a real confrontation had dissipated. Amtek, after a moment, hummed softly.

"Thanks," he said, just a touch awkwardly, "for the 'medical interference' back there. I hate being first down."

Ratchet just grunted. Ordinarily, he might have said "You're welcome" or "It's my job," but the words felt like acid today. Rather like that tensor, as he clenched his fist and stepped forward to take his turn under the hose.

"Are you all right?" Amtek asked, when the two of them had emerged from beneath the hard spray of water and air. "Barrage did hold you back for awhile."

"He always does," Ratchet replied, seemingly unconcerned as he shook some of the wet out.

"Torque's right though, isn't he?" Amtek pressed. "Your arm still hurts."

"Only when I work it."

"You never do."

"Well then."

"Primus," Amtek muttered. "Look, Ratchet, I know you're a medic, but shouldn't you see someone about that?"

Ratchet vented gently. "You should outgrade – join the corps," he said, managing to keep an even tone, despite the sharp twinge of pain as he shifted to check the integrity of the practice cartridge. Amtek gave a low whine of his engine, to which Ratchet said, with deliberate briskness: "Appointment's already made – I've got to turn in my gear before then, so if you'll excuse me...?"

So saying, he quit the wash racks at a swift pace before Amtek could muster a farewell.


	2. Object in Motion

That was how, some little while later, Ratchet ended up in the med bay, at the mercy of a bright neon orange medic. The medic, Flashflare, hummed soft perplexity, and his patient scowled at this.

"Just give me a minute," Flashflare said, without fuss and without looking up from his examination. Duly chastised, Ratchet managed to quell his impatience.

Theoretically, Ratchet knew how this worked after all. Upgrades were a fact of life – everybody underwent them from time to time of necessity. There were the regular programming patches, system upgrades, component improvements. Some had some aesthetic complaint they wanted to address. Then, too, there was always the desire to optimize, to see whether one couldn't adapt oneself better to a particular aspect of one's work. Sometimes, a 'bot would be struck by some new idea that required tools he hadn't been built with, or that hadn't ever been designed, even – those were always the most interesting and satisfying cases.

But regardless of the motives, medical bays and the medics who ran them scarcely thought anything of the myriad upgrade requests that regularly filled their mail queues, save in a few rare instances. Upgrading a Cybertronian's tech base was about as routine as the thrice annual maintenance exam. More time-consuming, granted, and complicated, but a successful upgrade was simply a matter of planning, of assessing the patient, of discussion, and then of having the technical wherewithal, skill, and time to make the changes and oversee a 'bot's post-re-configuration recovery.

A medic's life consisted of the rhythm of such checks and repairs, research, design and upgrades. Ratchet had lost track of the number of times he had performed such work for others, and he knew without looking at his own file that he'd undergone seventeen significant upgrades since being sparked. He had never had much reason to be troubled by any of it. He'd been made for such: built and trained by Iacon's premier medical cohort, he was meticulous to a fault when it came to his work and rarely had reason to redo any aspect of a patient's reconfiguration. And as a patient, he'd never had any trouble himself that didn't resolve within an acceptable stretch of time. On the contrary, friends and brothers often had had occasion to envy him his recuperative powers that made for shorter than average recoveries.

However, previous upgrades had always been aimed at bettering his medical tech base, or else keeping up with his model's evolution. He'd never been terribly concerned with his color scheme and had no complaints about his general build – so there were models that were more striking to look at, but so what? And he wasn't the sort to be fascinated by every new gadget someone developed, not even the gadgets proper to his own field. He'd certainly never thought about getting upgraded to suit himself to a non-medical task. Hand-helds would do for that sort of thing – he was not some cross-wired conglomerate of jerry-rigged parts to any purpose whatsoever!

But even _had_ he thought about it, he would never have imagined getting weaponry installed.

And that was the problem. Flashflare gave another hum and glanced sideways at the drone analyst that'd finished running Ratchet's weaponry protocols. Ratchet, who, granted, had less experience dealing with armament systems on a daily basis, nevertheless knew what blue lighting meant in any bay: clear.

"Psychosomatic effects are not uncommon," Flashflare told him, apologetically, which was hardly news to him, nor welcome. Flashflare canted an optical ridge, and his engine gave an inquisitive little whine: _Do you want to continue?_ For answer, Ratchet simply held out his arm for inspection. Flashflare was too good to vent over that, but Ratchet was no slouch himself, and he imagined he could hear it nevertheless. And it wasn't as though he could blame Flashflare in any case.

For there was no reason he ought to be here. Most 'bots could learn to handle a weaponry upgrade in well under a month. Full outgrades to military models might be desirable, and ordinarily, the number of changers was low enough to make that feasible. But with so many abandoning their native cohorts and functions for a military life and task, production was suffering; productive _capacity_ was suffering, even before one factored in the losses inflicted by Decepticon raids. A full outgrade took time and resources that could rarely be afforded anymore; hence the military preferred to install weaponry modules on its new soldiers. It was faster, and cost far less time and fewer parts to jerry-rig a 'bot and train the Jerry than the alternative.

Ratchet knew all of this. And he knew also that such "allo-modular upgrades," as such ad-hoc upgrade protocols were called, degraded directive and physical integrity, caused glitches, and neuropsychological conditions. One could compensate functionally for the foreign element in a 'bot's build and purpose, but when all was said and done, compensation was not integration – not in the truest sense. It was a distortion of form, and Ratchet despised it.

But it worked most of the time. Ratchet, who was quick to adapt to new hardware and fairly versatile with software patches anyway, should have shrugged the upgrade off and adapted inside of a week. Yet three weeks after adding a gun to his tool-suite, he kept popping the damn cartridge when he tried to activate his amp-meter. Or his welder. Or any of a half dozen other instruments installed in that arm, if he wasn't careful. Which was why he was here.

Although medics tended to make terrible patients, and Ratchet knew his own tendencies in that direction, he did like to think he wasn't stupid. Barrage's accusation – _You didn't even fake it and form a meter, either – go through the medical motions_ – had hit home in a way that even the sergeant's sharp claws could not. Amtek's worried questions in the wash rack had been but a mirror to his own doubts. Three weeks – it had been three weeks of exercises like this afternoon's, where he couldn't even go through the motions of his profession, because he literally couldn't go through the necessary motions to form up what he needed, and no sign of an end to it. An injured 'bot could short out or run dry because of this stupid glitch. Or worse, Ratchet could end up pointing a machine gun at him, if he didn't get his triggers straightened out. And what if he accidentally _shot_ someone...?

His horrific imaginings were interrupted by a low hum and series of clicks as Flashflare carefully retracted a set of digital probes from his patient's forearm and reformed his fingers. Ratchet flexed his wrist, reached and rubbed gently along a tensor line – the same that Barrage had lately abused. It was a habit he'd acquired since the gun had been installed, a sign of the changes that went with the decal: one part futile effort to ease the painful sense of _off_ ness that never seemed to subside, and one part – a large part – anxiety.

Flashflare, who could hardly have failed to notice, and who undoubtedly knew well enough what that habit meant, asked, "And you're sure you haven't been tinkering yourself? No self-modification?"

Ratchet gave him a look. "I know how to deal with upgrades – if I had tried to adjust something, I wouldn't have done it blindly, or left it unlogged. And I wouldn't use anything that could damage circuitry or other parts. It's not self-injury!"

Flashflare gave him an apologetic shrug and simply turned his attention to running a scan over the affected area, palm held low over Ratchet's arm, slowly following the varied surfaces of armor and exo-structure. Ratchet watched the numbers pop up on the medic's holo-screen, interpreting them automatically, and he vented gently over the results. His colleague gave him a sympathetic hum.

"I'm sorry, Ratchet," he said, and shook his head as he lowered his hand. "I'm not picking up anything physically wrong – no tensors on the verge of snapping, no overly pressurized hydraulics, no surgical debris. Your neural read-out didn't show any energy spikes, and I don't see any mistakes in the coding. You just need to give yourself time to adjust. You've had only a few weeks to get used to the weapons upgrade."

"Right," Ratchet grunted, running his own fingers lightly over reconfigured structures, micro-scanners engaged, which sent a little electric thrill along sensitive neural pathways. Flashflare watched him a moment, then said gently:

"Weaponry doesn't sit well with medical programming – less well than it sits with most programming."

"I _know_ that," he growled, with a derisive flare of tones for the medical pedantry.

"And you know I know it, too," Flashflare replied evenly. "Everybody on this ward knows it, and that you can't live in the conflict. You've got to resolve it: you need to realize what you are now, or it's going to kill you one day." A pause, then, quietly: "Are you certain you want to do this?"

At that, Ratchet gave him a glare, and a rumble of his engine, though he was hardly surprised by the question. It'd become a sort of refrain to his existence of late, and the irritating thing about it was that although his answer never changed, the question itself was enough to guarantee another hour spent battling his doubts back into submission. Granted, he won the battle: the fact that he was still here and giving the same answer testified to that. But it wasn't a fight he enjoyed, and it didn't help that his own body was fueling the side of doubt.

For though he knew very well that signal confusion was not unusual after an upgrade, this was different. Beyond the frustration with loss of control lay the only thinly-covered fear that somehow, this was a sign that he had no business here – that he should've stayed in Iacon, in the familiar confines of Paraprax District's Emergency Repair Bay. It wasn't as if Ratchet had wanted to be a weapon, after all. That wasn't what he'd volunteered himself to be when he'd volunteered himself to the Autobots. That wasn't why he was here.

Forty years it had been since the war had exploded in Kaon, and it was hard to say anymore that Megatron's fighters were "rebels" and not choke on the word, which made of them but a small faction on the fringes of a society. In those forty years, Megatron had won or made enough converts to put all of Cybertron, and by extension every one of its colonies, in convulsions. Production was down; supply lines were chancy, and an ever-increasing percentage of what was made in the way of medical supplies and energy rations went straight to the front. Life behind the lines was growing more and more strained, and only the horror of life on the lines could possibly hold anyone to the rationing schemas, to this level of frustration of need. Even so, every year, more and more changers left their places and swelled the ranks of the Jerries, whether they fought for Cybertron or Megatron.

Ratchet could tolerate the changers who leapt to fill a need, even if he cringed at the cobbled-together upgrades that didn't quite equal a fully thought-through outgrade. And he could tolerate the supply drawdown for himself. But what was he to do when a needed shipment of medical supplies didn't arrive, because it'd had to be diverted at the last minute to the front? He couldn't even always get the raw materials to fashion what he needed himself to treat his patients.

Still, he might have borne with it – like all cities, Iacon's outlying districts had suffered from missile attacks that even the orbital stations couldn't wholly shield, but it had been far from the brutal close-quarters combat that other cities had succumbed to. Or it had been, until Praxus. And that had been just the last crack in the casing. Two hellish weeks of triage and surgery on the med-evaced wounded of Praxus and almost no rest, and the pretense of neutrality had gone the way of entirely too many of his patients. He'd put in for transfer to a military medical cohort as a full-fledged combat surgeon.

Given that the Autobots were in dire need of front-line field medics, of whatever grade and ability, he ordinarily would've been snapped up immediately. However, when Ratchet had requested transfer, he'd requested it as a medic, seeking a medical posting. A medic was meant to preserve life – that was as basic as bedrock. It was built into him – it was what he was here for, first and last. It was nothing he'd ever wanted to deny or get around, and he had no intention of being anything other than a medic. He had no intention of becoming a soldier – of becoming a weapon.

Ratchet hadn't made any secret of any of that to the Autobot medical board assigned to assess his capacity to bear up to military needs. Were it not that his record was more than just sterling and that everyone knew that the military was short on combat medics, that avowed pacifism probably would've merited declining his offer to serve. As it was, it had still taken six rounds of interviews and arguments to obtain a release, and that only to a back-line ERB, despite his wishes.

He understood the reasoning. He'd read the reports and knew the stats on the schizophrenia that medics were prone to who spent any length of time on the front-lines. There was a reason for that shortage of medical personnel, and why even within their ranks, those permanently assigned to field positions – true combat medics – were few. Not even those new models who were built for combat stations tended to last – in fact, for reasons not well understood, they tended to break sooner than the medical Jerries – the converted civilian medical personnel recruited to combat posts – which took an enormous toll on a cohort. Nor was it only a psychological toll; there was a sizable material toll to consider, too.

Quite simply put, building those new combat medics was an enormous investment – more so than was usual, even for sophisticated medical models. They were not just a new design that put tools in different places or that had somewhat more powerful and diversified tool-suites and heavier armor – they were a prototype model designed to meet combat-specific needs.

For the same war that had ravaged Ratchet's orderly life in Iacon's ERB had wreaked havoc on supply lines that front-line medics depended on absolutely to function. Even with all the diversions to forward units, Decepticon raids had gutted anything resembling certainty on the supply front. Between irregular resupplies at base and the ever-present threat of being cut off behind enemy lines, combat medics had concluded that they needed a more "resilient" parts-supply than carry-kits alone could provide.

The IF-SSR medical model – which all and sundry agreed sounded like a bad logic loop to nowhere – answered to that need. Internal fabricators coupled with strategic systems redundancy took advantage of a sophisticated advance in molecular regeneration, making it possible for a field medic to cannibalize his own redundant parts at need, and to regenerate them, provided a sufficient chemical and energy matrix was maintained. In other words, the IF-SSR model gave combat medics a basic parts supply that could be renewed without returning to base or any civilized center.

But it was a very costly solution, not only for a strapped society, but for the individual. To build in that level of redundancy meant the IF-SSR modification needed a high-mass model, which simply took more energy in the first place to sustain and much more material to build. Nor did the problems end there. The unpleasantness of pulling internal parts in the hurry and chaos of battle all aside, stripping out parts caused mass variability that strained the limits of a Cybertronian's transformation system, and could easily go beyond them with catastrophic results for a medic who tried to transform. It could cause serious power and energy fluctuations, both of which just put more of a strain and drain on a 'bot's overall organism: failure to respect spec requirements could cause a total systems failure if the medic wasn't careful. And there was still that unexpected propensity towards schizophrenic breakdown in the prototype models...

Were circumstances any less dire, there likely wouldn't be any good excuse to produce a model with so unstable an anatomy, let alone deploy it. As it was, medical command preferred to produce prototypes where it had to and otherwise seek its combat medics from the ranks of conventional medical line models who enlisted. An outgrade-upgrade protocol did exist that could convert them to carry the new technology in modified, time-tested models, and for whatever reason, the incidence of schizophrenic breakdown was significantly lower.

But even so, it was a painful, resource-intense reconfiguration, disorienting in the extreme to the convert, and dangerous. High-mass models were harder in any case to adapt to than moving from high to lower-mass models, but the regenerative process and the systems redundancy required by the IF-SSR modification forced converts into mass ranges up to four times that of their original model. Body processing and self-sensing were enormously complicated, overwhelmingly so for a time, and it could take close to a year fully to adapt. As a result, only combat medics were currently eligible – indeed, mandated – to make the conversion; it simply wasn't worth the price in misery and resources, otherwise, to outfit 'bots with a doubly reconfigured form that most of them couldn't handle.

Ratchet, who kept up with new models and with line model evolution as a matter of course, was well aware of the risks and trials associated with the IF-SSR outgrade. He therefore wasn't looking forward to that conversion, but he trusted his own tolerances and was willing to go through with it to get to the entirely too many 'bots who died on the front for lack of medical attention before they ever saw a back-line ERB.

However, the Autobot medical board assigned to Ratchet's case – a board that included the Prime's CMO, Flicksaw, given the circumstances – was not convinced that anyone needed a committed medical pacifist serving as a field surgeon. Even having him on the back-lines was a risk that might cost more than it was worth, even without the outgrade. But putting him through one of the most difficult reconfigurations one could undergo short of outgrading from wheels to wings or from transport to structure...?

"Your capacity for modification isn't simply a question of your physical capacity to handle the IF-SSR reconfiguration," Flicksaw had said, again and again. "A reconfiguration intended for purposes that you disagree with is less likely to take. We can't justify the investment – not unless you give us a reason to think you'll defend it."

So long as Ratchet held to the purpose of medical models, that guarantee was beyond his power to give, though he'd at least managed to talk them into taking him on provisionally, for a probationary period. Weaponry upgrades being relatively minor, they could certainly justify installing them even on a pacifist, and, as he'd pointed out, it would be a baseline by which to evaluate him. If he couldn't handle that, obviously there was no reason to consider any of the more extensive modifications, and at least they'd have one more surgeon to staff a base hospital.

That was a risk the board could see its way to taking, and so Ratchet had bent to the requirements of military regulations in exchange for a chance at the assignment he was looking for. There was, at least, a goodly amount of flexibility in terms of what sort of weaponry a 'bot could take on: so long as he had at least one decent ranged weapon, the rest was a matter of choice. Thus the pulse-taser that had gone in on his left arm had been a concession to Ratchet's medical sensibilities, and he'd gone with the lightest machine gun he could get away with on the other.

Not that the weapon class seemed to make any difference so far as adapting to it was concerned. He really hadn't expected his own body to stymie him in this – not to this degree, not given that he usually had so few problems with upgrades. And the direction of the stymying was worrisome – since when did an upgrade module, however ill-fitting with the rest of his person and purpose, function in itself but interfere with his regular transformations...?

Flashflare was still watching him, he realized, waiting on a more substantial answer. And so: "Yes," he said shortly, irritation rife in his undertones. "I'm sure."

In response to which the other 'bot simply dipped his floodlights in a conciliatory manner. But he didn't back down, either.

"Look, Ratchet, I sympathize, I do," his colleague insisted. "But if you're going to go through with this, then you need to come to terms with the fact that you are what you are. Don't give yourself a case of schizophrenia about it by chasing after what's gone." And when Ratchet still said nothing, just continued to stare at him, Flashflare vented a bit.

"Just spend some time on the practice ranges," he cajoled, changingtacks. "There's plenty of space on the ranges for newcomers and regulars getting used to upgrades, and if nothing else, you'll frag your sergeant off less during practice."

At that, Ratchet flared his vents slightly, even as armo angled defensively. "Has he complained?" he asked.

"Barrage was in here a day or two ago for maintenance," Flashflare allowed. Then: "He said he had some concerns about your progress – about medical reservations you have that are interfering with your ability to act on the field."

"I'm sure he does," Ratchet grunted, but offered nothing further. After all, it wasn't news. Ratchet's particular principled commitments might not be widely known outside the med bay, but anyone would pick him out in a flash in an exercise as the worst soldier on the field, even without his color scheme. There was a reason that he was Barrage's favorite 'demonstrator' – the sergeant probably could qualify as an EMT with the amount of time he'd spent with his hands wedged between the various plates of Ratchet's armor, demonstrating kill-zones that Ratchet had failed to take advantage of on other the other Jerries during drills.

For his part, Ratchet was willing to testify to the sergeant's knowledgeability and general trustworthiness – after all, he joked in his moments of black, self-deprecating humor, Barrage hadn't killed him yet, despite having had a grip on several vital parts, and he knew exactly how much heat or pressure to apply to make matters uncomfortable without causing Ratchet to twitch in some fatal fashion. That had to be worth something, medically speaking, even if Barrage's educational torment was hard to endure – almost as hard as it was to watch, not that saying anything would help. Ratchet ought to know – he'd tried, and after Barrage had run his squad 'til they'd dropped as an 'alternative', his squad mates had quietly but firmly insisted they would rather put up with being made an occasional example than spend their down-time laboring under the sergeant.

"It's not that we like it," Amtek had tried to explain, "and it's not that we don't get what you're saying, it's just the way you roll here: path of least resistance."

The entire affair had left Ratchet deeply disturbed, but faced with a united front and the guilty knowledge that he was mostly the cause of Barrage's dissatisfaction with their performance as a unit, he'd acquiesced. And admittedly, he could at least tolerate his own status as prime target – he might end the day in pain after the sergeant was done with him, but he knew very well that he was courting the chance of suffering far worse. So every practice day, he steeled himself to endure and stepped onto the field, because for someone with his commitments, there were only two choices, and he'd already foreclosed on one of them. He couldn't complain overly of the consequences, therefore.

But other than the occasional joke, Barrage's lessons, and his own central role in them, were nothing he wanted to discuss, and Flashflare, after a few moments, mercifully let the subject drop.

"You know as well as I do that with any modification, whatever it might be, use makes for familiarity," he said instead, "and familiarity decreases these kinds of effects, regardless of the larger picture you're dealing with. All right?"

It was sound advice, and Ratchet knew it, even if it was the last thing he wanted to hear. He therefore thanked Flashflare for his trouble, if with less grace than was deserved, and left the medical wing of the base, glitch unfixed, problem unresolved.


	3. Contradiction

The base itself was a little ways north of Iacon, located on one of the old airfields, and the bays and cargo areas built into the earth beneath it. The medical wings had been built along the edges of landing bays topside, and as Ratchet stepped out into the open air, he could see the city spires just ten klicks down the road. Not for the first time, he considered taking a drive out to it, if only to spin up a bit. He had the time for it, and didn't even need to request permission – a privilege he rather suspected he'd been granted in the hopes that he might rethink his decision.

But he hadn't, and though he didn't truly think he was in danger of reneging on his choice, he had to admit that the grind was getting to him. Maybe if he hadn't had this glitch to deal with, he wouldn't feel as though he'd been somehow unhinged from himself, as if he didn't sit right in himself, and rattled about in his own frame. Everyone knew medics were not well-suited to war. But with the blasted glitch, he couldn't even do his own job properly without hand-helds – something that did not inspire confidence three weeks later. Even Ophiux, the brother to whom he was closest among all his native cohort, had despaired of him.

"How long is it going to take you to come to your senses?" he'd asked, when last they'd met near the end of a medical supply run to Iacon. Ophiux had looked him up and down, and Ratchet had flexed his fingers slightly in discomfort as the other's scan had fixed on his right arm with medical surety. "You weren't made to be a military Jerry, Ratch!"

"That's why they brand you with the decals," he'd replied, striving for such levity as he could manage, "so you remember what you're for." And when Ophiux hadn't responded, just stared at him, he'd sobered, and insisted: "I'm still a medic, Ophiux, no matter what spare parts they tack on."

"Then you're not a soldier. Ratchet, you _can't_ be both!"

"I'm not," he'd assured him.

"Then stay here, in a bay, where you belong. Or is there something to make you stay out there...?" That scan had intensified, made his whole arm tingle, and he'd turned away, just started walking. "Ratchet?"

"I've got to go," he'd said over his shoulder. "I've got work to do."

He'd not been back since then, nor spoken with any of his Iacon brethren, not even Ophiux, who hadn't called. All the arguments, all the resistance to his leaving that had plagued him since he'd requested transfer – it seemed they'd finally been settled, but not because he'd won his cohort over to his view. He'd simply failed finally to win Ophiux, because Ophiux had seen... well, likely what his squad mates did every day, and he did wonder that, between a group of Jerries he'd not known more three weeks and his own cohort, it should be the former still holding out hope for him.

Or no, that wasn't true – they just knew when they were stuck with someone and had a healthy sense of their own self-interest.

"Slaggit, Ratchet, get it in gear," his squad mates would beg every time he had to reach for a hand-held. "You want to fix us, fragging fix yourself first!"

He wanted to – he wanted to, as he'd wanted very few things in the long life of his kind, but it wasn't in his hands – literally, in a sense. If he'd been even a marginally decent soldier, they might have tolerated the problem; but he wasn't, and if he couldn't even fulfill his own design, he was worse than useless. He was dangerous to them, and they knew it, and it showed. Very few in his squad were openly disdainful like Torqueline, and many, like Amtek, seemed embarrassed not to like him better, but seemingly all-encompassing incompetence won him no friends, unless it were among his medical brethren. But he could only tolerate their pity in controlled doses, and he'd had an overload of it in the past two weeks.

All of which together made life on base rather isolating, and he had two hours before shifts changed – dead time that weighed the heavier for his frustrations.

 _Come on,_ he chided himself then. _You brought this on yourself. You could've stayed when Ophiux asked you to._ Yet here he was, because if his unqualified medical commitments made him an anomaly, he couldn't see his way clear to doing what he'd been built for unless under an Autobot decal. And that meant he was going to have to take Flashflare's advice very pragmatically and try harder to learn to use the blasted gun just so that he could learn to control himself. At least then, he wouldn't be absolutely useless on the field. And so, with another cycle of vents, he headed off reluctantly to the airfield that had been converted to a range.

~0~

Given that they were at war, the practice range was rarely quiet. Ratchet had been instructed on its safety regs upon arrival, and so he went carefully along the back perimeter, skirting what looked like another squadron mock combat drill, and a handful of other 'bots who were clustered along the targeting ranges, potting drones that whizzed about on their hoverpods. From the number of hits being scored, they were regulars, maybe even sharpshooters, and Ratchet had no intention of joining them.

Instead, he made his way to the more remote, sectioned off area designated for new recruits and recovering troops. Another medic – this one a junior grade field tech, whose brilliant, reflective white armor bore dark blue emergency personnel decals along with the required Autobot decal dyed screamingly scarlet – glanced up at his arrival. Or rather, down – clearly he was an air lift class transport – and then scanned Ratchet, asking: "Designation?"

"Ratchet, surgical officer, grade three," he told the other, who entered that into a datafile, ran it against records, then nodded and waved him past, rotor-blades clicking softly.

"If you need assistance, use trainee channel three to comm me – the name's Skypax," the field tech said. "And you can get gunnery tech Backfire on channel two if you're looking for instruction, sir."

Ratchet muttered a quick thanks and hastily took himself off – not to shoot at anything, but just to find a quiet space where he could practice his transformation sequence in peace, and at least not have to worry about hitting anyone in case of an accidental misfire. There were PT areas past the target ranges that were set up as obstacle courses, with plenty of open space, and Ratchet settled himself in a corner of one of them, relieved to find that no one seemed to be using them currently.

He glanced down at his right arm, flexed his fingers, rotated his wrist a bit, and winced at the stiff pull that felt like hydraulics balking. _Psychosomatic,_ he told himself firmly, vents battening down as he pulled air in. He probably shouldn't do that – he didn't _need_ to just for transformation, and little habits like that getting synced up to and integrated with a trigger sequence could make matters difficult should he ever find himself in a vacuum – but he set the nagging perfectionist in him aside in favor of simply going through the transformation sequences that once had been so unthinkingly familiar.

Scanner. Diagnostic laser. Cutting laser. Magnetic screw driver. Digital probes. Clamp. With some effort and concentration, they gave him little trouble – they were designed to function with simple, minimal, and relatively isolated somatic triggers, with the probes being the most complex. Even so, their triggers were nothing like the ones that covered the more extensive tool-transformations. Speaking of which, Ratchet paused a moment, rerunning their sequence triggers mentally before clenching his fist and giving a quick, sharp shake, aiming for amp-meter.

"Slaggit!" he swore, and winced when the cartridge popped again, jamming the struts trying to reform into the meter and painfully crimping tensors. Vents flaring, he reformed back to standard robotic mode, waited a few seconds, then tried again... with as much success.

After several unsuccessful attempts, when he began to think he was going to strip insulation and perhaps even sever a tensor if he kept on with it, he switched to trying for arc-welder. That went more smoothly, at least, and when he managed that transformation on the third try, he attempted to switch from there to amp-meter... and jammed himself again. Growling, he went back to the starting sequence, determined to get through one complete set of tool transformations without incident before he left the range.

Unhappily, that was a goal easier set than accomplished. Intent on achieving it, he lost track of time, and consequently had no notion of how long he'd been struggling when he heard an engine rev, and then the tell-tale tone sequence of someone going through a full transformation. Startled EM sensors snapped to focus, struggling to get a fix on the newcomer before he'd even looked up.

But for some reason, they seemed to slide off of nothing, and so he only got to watch the last stages of the intruder's transformation, as the 'bot came to a sliding stop before him, skidding out on one knee and arm. Somehow, he managed to make it look fairly graceful too, and as soon as he'd come to a halt, a few meters from Ratchet's position, he fairly bounced to his feet, gave himself a shake, and blew some dust out his vents. He spun his treads briefly in their wells, ejecting dirt and dust, but otherwise did not seem terribly concerned with either. Then, apparently noticing Ratchet for the first time, he said breezily:

"Hey."

"Hey yourself," Ratchet replied, unsure what else to say, as he lowered his sore arm.

"Sorry if I startled you," the 'bot continued, managing somehow to seem both sincere and cheerfully unapologetic at the same time. "Couldn't resist tryin' out the sensor dampeners on a live target. Did they work?"

"The – I suppose," Ratchet replied, regarding the newcomer with some confusion. Now that the 'bot was actually standing before him, training sensors on him did yield _something_ , but it was a weak, unstable sensor ghost at best. The medic frowned, interest suddenly piqued. "I didn't think you could rig a set of dampeners for a model your size."

For the newcomer was definitely on the small side, his helm radio array – if that's what the spikes actually were – just coming up to the set of chassis-mounted lights that Ratchet bore.

"That's what they say," the other replied, and this time there was no mistaking the predatory glee. He flexed his shoulders back gently – probably a trigger sequence – and of a sudden, his signature flared to life for Ratchet, as the dampeners disengaged. Retracting the camouflage visor as well, the 'bot chuckled, engine purring smugly. "Guess we just proved 'em wrong!"

"So it would seem."

The little silver 'bot stretched a bit, bouncing on his treads, then flashed Ratchet a greeting with his lights, as he said, by way of belated introduction, "I'm Jazz, by the way. And you're one of the new medical Jerries."

"Ratchet," Ratchet supplied, returning the flash. And when Jazz simply nodded, as if knowingly, asked: "Is there a reason you've run my file?"

"There a reason you'd think I have?"

Ratchet blinked. "You seem to know who I am..."

"Oh, that. Don't need records for _that._ Autobot, Decepticon, Neutral – " a casually dismissive engine whine accompanied this " – don't matter, all you medics favor colors that could blind a body before he ever recognized the decals. And you're here on the newbie grounds, practicin', so either you just got potted and patched or you got upgraded. But there ain't been any medicorps casualties lately, and I know there're three new medics, one built-to-military specs, and two of 'em jerried recruits who'd need to relearn their tool-suite. 'Sides, there ain't so many of you an' I know Flicksaw's usual crew, so process of deduction," he said and shrugged. "Don't tell anyone, though. I got a reputation to maintain."

 _A reputation for what?_ Ratchet wondered, but didn't get as far as asking, for Jazz pressed on: "How's it going, anyhow? Upgrades and the new life and all that?" Ratchet did not answer immediately – even had he been prepared to answer, a personal inquiry from an unknown and unexpected quarter was hardly one he would answer easily. Jazz, however, once more moved ahead to fill the silence with his own conclusion. "Rough, is it?"

Ratchet blinked at him. "Do you always talk this much?" he found himself asking, genuinely curious, and got another chuckle.

"Occupational hazard," the other mech answered, though he did not, Ratchet noted, volunteer his occupation. Then, unerringly returning to sensitive topics: "I'm right though, aren't I? Huh. Lemme see?" And he held out his hands.

 _Tetramerously symmetric_ , a part of Ratchet, the detached clinical diagnostician in him, noted; the other part, for reasons he couldn't quite fathom, was obeying the implicit command. Those symmetrical hands closed on his, and claw-sharp fingertips gently played over Ratchet's hands and back over his wrists, needling between forearm struts, sending an odd tingle up his arms. That tingle edged into discomfort when one claw slid along that one peculiarly sensitive tensor cable, and when one of Jazz's needle-tipped fingers caught in and began running along the barely visible seam of an embedded sensor, Ratchet hissed through his vents, armor contracting defensively, as a transformation sequence partially engaged.

"Sorry 'bout that," Jazz apologized quickly, sliding his hands back as Ratchet swiftly reformed. "New trigger, I guess?"

"In a manner of speaking," Ratchet answered, just a little sourly, and Jazz cocked his head as if in response to some elusive note.

"Mm. Yeah, you medics and your hands – always a tough re-con, what with everything you got packed in there, and all the sensors. Probably got your triggers rearranged and your kinesthetics all screwed up tryin' to be efficient with 'em," the other 'bot said sagely, and released him then. And he gave Ratchet a close look, as if suddenly recalling something. "You're the pacifist, aren't you?"

For a split second, Ratchet hesitated, caught off-guard by the frankness of the question. Jazz hummed softly, sounding self-satisfied. Uncomfortable and a bit irked, Ratchet asked, just a little archly, "I suppose you've been talkingwith my squad?"

"Gotta have somethin' to deduce from. Might as well be scuttlebutt," the other replied, then shrugged. "Plus, I've been through a couple hard re-cons, too," he said enigmatically. "It's always rough when you've got to fit something in that doesn't work with the parts you've already got, and rougher when you got reservations. You end up with all manner of crossed wires and the like."

"Who _are_ you?" Ratchet demanded, rather abruptly and with no little bafflement. For the 'bot's somewhat irritating, round-about manner of speaking aside, he seemed otherwise remarkably... untroubled. There was just absolutely nothing in his manner of the discomfort most others displayed around him. Perhaps the unhappy, friendless weeks of facing suspicion and incomprehension had warped his expectations, but the other's sublime confidence set Ratchet on edge, and the response did nothing to reassure him:

"Told you that, too: name's Jazz," the silver 'bot said easily. Ratchet canted an optical ridge, optics narrowing, and Jazz held his hands up, though his mood seemed not at all affected by the glare the medic was leveling at him. "All right, and I'm a reconnaissance 'bot, since you're askin'."

"Recon," the medic murmured, as something that'd been subtly nagging at him suddenly crystallized. "That's why you've got those dampeners: you're with intelligence."

"Your business ismy business," the other quipped, brightly, before qualifying: "At least when I'm on shift. Off duty, I'm just curious."

Which _did_ explain quite a bit, Ratchet supposed; it also prompted him to ask, suspiciously, "So what am I, then? A project?"

"Nah. You're just handy."

"I see." Though in point of fact, Ratchet didn't, quite. But he wasn't about to say so, and asked instead, "Then what are you out here for? Not for the dampeners."

"What makes you say that?"

Ratchet vented hard, and a little sarcastically. "Deduction," he said dryly tossing Jazz's watch-word back at him. "You were out here, skulking, by yourself, and you don't strike me as the sort to test something like those without the audience they're supposed to fool."

This got him a grin, as optics brightened.

"Like the way you think," Jazz declared, then half turned, sweeping a hand toward his left leg. Ratchet narrowed his optics, then shut them down deliberately a moment. Surgical vision interface came up on reactivation and an armor panel swelled to fill his visual frame, then reformed a second time at finer resolution as he focused more narrowly. Topographical scanning kicked in, tracking Ratchet's visual sweep, overlaying Jazz's silver-grey with red where surface abnormalities bounced the scan back, so that he could see, then, the nearly invisible welding seams that zig-zagged up that leg in an uneven welter of tracks, from wheel-well to hip. Tensor cabling, too, showed signs of relatively recent tearing and heat-warp, and some of it had clearly been replaced...

"Courtesy of my last assignment," Jazz's voice sounded from out of frame.

Ratchet blinked twice, suffering the brief disorientation as regular vision was restored, and possibilities flitted through his mind. He wasn't a munitions expert, but the military trauma database was extensive and heavily cross-linked to the arms databases, and he had plenty of time to read. And so he did. Voraciously. Because even if it made him _want_ to kill somebody for inventing that many ways to terminate a 'bot, outrage didn't save patients. Diagnostic skill, however, often did, and on a battlefield, skill needed the information those files contained. Skill of a different sort went into repairing that damage, and whoever had worked on Jazz had done a good job getting things back together, which made diagnosis after the fact difficult, but...

"Either you got hit with a set of frangible shells, or that was one slagging muck of an explosion you got in the way of," he judged, and felt compelled to add, sharply: "Either way, you got lucky: easier to fabricate a new leg than repair it half the time."

"It _was_ a pretty fantastic blast – one of my best, if I do say so myself," the other replied, sounding pleased. "And yeah, I got lucky. Slagged a bunch of cabling, leaked a lot of energon and coolant, and consequently nearly burned out a few systems getting back. Worth it, though. And at least I didn't lose any transformation nodes, so I could wheel it home. On a flat tire, granted, but hey, it'll do in a pinch!"

"Let me understand this," the medic said, not bothering to disguise his incredulity. " _You_ were the one who set the explosive?"

"Yep."

"And you _still_ ended up getting caught in the blast?"

"Yep."

"And then you nearly flat-lined yourself driving home?"

"Uh-huh."

Ratchet shook his head, appalled and also (though he didn't want to admit it) just a little in awe, if only of the skewboard logic that had gone into that sequence of decisions: _Why under the double moons would anyone set a charge and_ _ **not**_ _make certain to give himself time to get out of range?_ Almost without thinking, as if in sympathetic reaction, he rubbed along that sore tensor line. "You're insane!"

"Occupational requirement," Jazz agreed, apparently not dismayed in the least. "But I ain't the pacifist aiming to get flung to the front lines on a combat squad, either. Gotta hand it to you, doc. I think that beats most of what I do in the crazy department. And that takes some doin'!" the silver 'bot said, still radiating cheer, but there was something hard as steel and sharper than his claws beneath that up-beat voice and demeanor.

Ratchet suppressed the urge to flare his vents, though perversely, he was almost relieved to have the main matter of contention out in the open at least. "I'm not aiming for front-lines for the paradox of it," he explained flatly. "I'm just trying to do my job."

"Hope so, 'cause word of warning – whatever it was got you here, it's gonna be lookin' a little singed and grimy after a couple nights on the line, lying around in the dirt and scrabbling for parts and bullets. Some 'bots go lookin' for the quick ride out after that, but – " Jazz shrugged eloquently " – let's just say, there ain't no real reverse in the middle of things."

At that, Ratchet bristled a bit. "I'm not planning to run," he growled.

"Mm." Jazz's engine gave a low whine. "Well, I'll give it to the field medics – you're crazy fraggers, going out there with color schemes that draw fire like oil when the 'Cons think we're winnin', but I ain't seen one of you back down yet. And given what you do, I don't imagine you'll be too much bothered just from steppin' in somebody's gears and fluids, either," Jazz conceded. "But I'm not talkin' about you running, doc."

Ratchet cocked his head, frowning. "Then what _are_ you talking about?" he demanded.

"I'm talkin' about the _quick_ ride out." And when this clearly conveyed nothing to Ratchet, the smaller 'bot clarified: "I mean having – or getting – a death wish."

Ratchet felt cold spread through him at that, as armor pulled in a little tighter. "Why do you imagine I'd have – or get – one?"

"Ain't imagination – just I've been in this from the start," came the prompt reply. "Look, doc, we're not made to fight originally, a lot of us Autobots – that's truer every year, an' you know it. Means a lot of us didn't have the benefit, before the war, of havin' a few loose screws, meaning we're all looking to prove somethin', you might say. You put a medical code like yours on top of that, an' you're asking for a world of hurt – and I don't just mean for you. You know what the unit stats are for fragging?"

"For – _what_?"

"Not the metaphoric kind," Jazz clarified quickly, grinning, though that steel rang still in the undertones. "Well?" he pressed. "Do you?"

" _No."_ Ratchet's tone was clipped, and he favored the other with a frosty glare, not that it appeared to have any effect.

"Look it up some time. Point bein', I'd hate to see you go that route, and so would everybot else, 'cause medics go straight for the kill-spots every time an' you don't go by yourselves. You lot don't mess around when you get into the mercy-metin' mood. But snappin' like that's a guaranteed quick ride to the smelting pit – 'bout as sure as goin' up against jets on a plain with what you're packin', and at least you don't have to wait for 'em," Jazz informed him.

Ratchet digested this in silence for a little while; caught between disgust and outrage (and anxiety – that, too), he couldn't immediately respond. Finally: "I _don't have_ a death wish," he repeated emphatically, offense vibrating in his bass harmonics. And he couldn't quite forbear from adding: "If you've got doubts, you might check that medical code of mine on that matter."

Jazz regarded him a moment, then spread his hands, and Ratchet felt the air 'blur' around them as powerful grappler electromagnets flared briefly to life, as if to wipe the tension away... or else to 'smear' it further.

"There's that, true enough," he replied simply, then, after a brief pause, flashed a farewell. "Be seein' you, doc!" With that, he turned and strode off, heading back towards the main part of the camp. Ratchet scowled. That didn't fit, as an ending – he might not be one of Flicksaw's neuropsychs, but he knew when he was being pushed, and hard. Yet the bewildering itinerary of Jazz's conversation, passing through a thicket of associations, was such that the whole of it, and crucially, the motivating why of that interrogation, escaped him, though clearly it had something to do with the same commitments that put everyone off.

Whatever it was that had moved him to ask, though, Jazz seemed to think he'd gotten an answer. And Ratchet would have to be an idiot not to recognize that said answer hardly satisfied him.

Which made two of them, because Ratchet was getting damned tired of being on the doubtful end of everyone's skepticism – his own included. Analysis spun out trails of thought, therefore, seeking a line to trace back to a motive for this odd and frustrating encounter, one that he could argue to a more finished (and favorable) end, at least. Jazz, of course, just kept walking...

Intent upon that retreating figure, something caught his eye – a slight hesitation in Jazz's step. Most 'bots not built to medical specs or trained to look for it wouldn't have noticed, but he knew the signs of hydraulics overcompensating still, after being rebuilt. It was a slagging wonder he'd gotten out of that explosion intact, Ratchet thought, and found himself wondering how many of those difficult re-cons Jazz had mentioned had come about because of calls even closer than this one, which at least he'd walked away from.

 _I've been in this from the start,_ Jazz had said, which put him at what? Up to forty years in some combat zone or other? Maybe longer? His wasn't a model that was popular in Cybertron's northern hemisphere, according to the medical demographics Ratchet most relied on for his work. If he was from somewhere in the south, then he might well have been involved in this madness long before the war had officially begun. Perhaps even before anyone had really noticed there was a problem. So maybe he was hitting combat fatigue. Maybe he had 'a few loose screws'...

But that was all the province of Flicksaw's neuropsychs and somebody who knew Jazz's case history. Ratchet was not one such, and he had no such access. He was a surgeon, and so he said, "You're not new."

Jazz paused, turned back towards him, his lights flashing questioningly.

"I said, you're not new," Ratchet repeated.

The silver 'bot gave a low hum of his engine, then said, "You wanna elaborate on that, doc?"

"Well, if you're not new, you're also not here on the 'newbie grounds' because your leg's bothering you that much – another few days, on the outside, I'd say, and your body will have sorted itself out. Meantime, you won't even notice anything's off-kilter unless you work yourself pretty hard, if then," he replied, with the confidence of one who'd rebuilt enough 'bots and body parts to know precisely what he was talking about. "You don't need to be here to practice."

Jazz tilted his head slightly, and Scintillax's light reflected orangely in the visor that had slid back over his optics. "Suppose you've been lookin' at _my_ file," he said, sounding amused.

"Profile Jazz, _special ops_ senior field tech grade two. Repairs effected at Nova Cronum three weeks ago, and no flags for upgrades – not for the past six months, when the dampeners went in at Saanakaar orbital, _"_ Ratchet replied, by way of confirmation. "You have absolutely no reason to be out here. _"_

"Curiosity's a reason."

Ratchet let his engine rev at that. "I'm not a project or a puzzle."

"Don't suppose you are, but you gotta admit, you're expectin' to catch the funny looks – otherwise, you ain't nearly as smart as you give off," Jazz answered back, breezily.

 _Damn Special Ops, anyways_ , Ratchet thought, struggling against a sharp retort. His opponent, who no doubt had interrogated more slippery subjects than an irritated new member of the medical corps, just watched him, smiling slightly. If he really was in this for curiosity's sake, no doubt he was enjoying himself...

"What do you want?" he asked, therefore, in as calm a voice as he could manage.

"Just trying to figure you," was the easy response, and Ratchet decided that that was probably the truth. Or at least, it was probably true, though he did not trust the 'why' of it. Still, Jazz wasn't the only one who believed in the power of reasoning...

"I'm a medic. You know what Neutral means to a medic?"

Jazz gave a brief flare of tones and shrugged.

"It means knowing where the front is by tracing supply diversions to the latest killing field," Ratchet informed him. "It means measuring developments in armaments by the influxes of reports on how to treat new kinds of war wounds. And it means that when Praxus falls next door, a huge overflow of injured 'bots ends up in your ERB because the Autobots can't seem to get the personnel or the facilities to handle the volume of cases, to say nothing of the severity of them. Care to guess the reason for that medical shortfall?"

Jazz waved a hand. "Something about medics and soldiering not goin' together so well. Some sort of primary directive conflict – it's a funny thing," he said, as the smile sharpened.

"Isn't it just?" Ratchet replied deadpan, and paused significantly. "I'm here on medical grounds. That means I'm here because I'm needed here – because of my directives, not despite them. And I'm not planning on opting out of them. That ought to be enough for you."

Jazz seemed seriously to consider this a moment, then vented air as he opened a comm link. "Jazz to duty medic, respond please," he said to the air.

Almost instantly, Skypax's voice came back: "This is Field Tech Skypax. What's your situation?" 

"I need some assistance – PT course four, situation alcix two," Jazz replied, and killed the link. Ratchet stiffened. Alcix two was psychological distress... Jazz, noting his reaction, relaxed himself, letting the gaps in his own armature open to their widest in a calming gesture. "Relax, doc, I ain't turnin' you in. Just got a question for you, since you're bein' so accommodatin'."

"Which is?"

"How many tool-transformations on your right arm?" Jazz asked, gesturing to the appendage in question.

"My wha – Why?"

"'Cause I was watching – tryin' to keep count, but it's hard to know when you're balking every couple tries. How many?"

"Eight," Ratchet answered after a minute.

"Nine," Jazz flatly contradicted him, and shook his head when Ratchet started to argue. "You got nine, doc – seven you did, eight you tried, and then there's interferin' number nine. Machine gun, 'less I'm mistaken."

"That's not a _tool_ ," Ratchet began heatedly to object. But he hadn't quite finished out 'tool' when suddenly, without warning, sunlight flashed in his eyes, reflecting off a shield, and when he'd polarized his optics, Ratchet found himself looking down the barrel of a gun.

"You're a medic, so I can see how you'd think that," Jazz conceded, casually, just as if he were discussing the weather. There was a brief, stunned silence, then:

"You're kidding." In the midst of incredulity, it was the first thing that came to Ratchet's mind, in response to which, Jazz simply twisted his wrist just slightly, so that the medic could hear the whine of micro-generators spinning up. In the center of the shield, the gun barrel's rim-heating elements began to glow a worrisome hot blue. The smaller 'bot didn't waver a bit, and Ratchet fought the nearly automatic urge to cringe as target-scanning pinged against his armor, centering on that vulnerable point just under his chin, where a 'bot's protection tended to be weakest. It didn't help that, given the height discrepancy, Jazz had a perfect shot.

 _Just stay calm,_ urged the surgeon in him, the one who had dealt with the fall out from Praxus in the form of horrifically injured, disoriented, and memory-shot Autobots who came online sometimes ready to shoot or otherwise maim the medics tending them...

"Noticed you didn't form that gun up earlier," Jazz continued conversationally. "That because you won't or because you can't?" A pause, then: "You even _tried_ that transformation yet, doc?"

"No," Ratchet replied, even as thoughts narrowed to a frantic assessment of his options. Should he even attempt a remote hack to lock Jazz down, or would he be better off trying to get in close to go for the other's interface ports? Ports were a lot easier for someone like him, but there was the small problem of getting to them. He didn't know the other 'bot's make, and now was not the time to try and access the specs database of southern hemisphere models. Moreover, Jazz was armed, and from his size and how he moved, was undoubtedly quick. Ratchet wasn't necessarily slow, but he wasn't confident that he'd be fast _enough_... "Not yet."

"Try it," Jazz ordered.

Vents fluttered unevenly – confused, unpleasant surprise. "What do you imagine that would prove?" he demanded, uncomprehending, but the other gave a negative flare of undertones.

"The game don't work that way, doc," Jazz said.

"I'm not your play thing." The words, and the sharp tone, were out of his mouth before he could censor either of them, and Ratchet felt his armor contract protectively, minimizing its gaps, anticipating painful retaliation. Jazz, however, just cocked his head, and for the life of him, the medic couldn't read him. Not so much as a twitch or a spike in his energy signature.

"Good thing I ain't playing," the special ops tech replied coolly, then repeated: "Try it."

 _Where is that fragging field tech?!_ Ratchet wondered furiously. But he couldn't think about Skypax right now. _You've got to turn him,_ his surgeon-voice was insisting. _You've got to get him answering you._

"Looking for that quick ride out yourself, is that it?" he asked, grasping at the one logical point he had that might serve him. "I thought you were opposed to going down that route."

"Last chance, doc," came the response, apparently utterly indifferent to reason or protest, and it was _then_ that the fear really began to sink in with the dreadful realization that if Jazz decided to shoot him, there was absolutely nothing that Ratchet was going to be able to do or say to prevent it. Unless he was serious about wanting to see Ratchet form up that gun, but—

Something white and blue glinted on the edges of Ratchet's vision. Jazz must've seen it too, for he shifted suddenly to train his weapon on it. _Slag!_ Ratchet found time to think before everything went to hell...

Later on, Ratchet would be able to reconstruct the order of events by working backwards, but he never could recall them beyond an impressionistic blur of movement that ended in an explosive-sounding glow and numbingly electrifying impact that made his vision go white. Another jarring impact, this time with the ground, and then he and Skypax were face to face, each of them holding a silver arm pinned to the earth as Jazz spasmed, current visibly arcing in the gaps between armor plates. Skypax looked as dazed as Ratchet felt, but medical need admitted no delays, and Ratchet was no junior field tech.

He took a quick, orienting scan of his patient, seeking access points. Then, without even waiting for the probe transformation to complete itself, he rammed the fingers of his hastily reformed left hand into the nearest interface ports, struggling to lock Jazz down into stasis before the smaller 'bot could recover from the shock. Even riding the downside of a power surge, it wasn't easy – Ratchet cursed and winced as he collided with a set of persistent firewall defenses that seemed specially designed to counter a medic's commands.

But he wasn't going for Jazz's memories or core programming – he was aiming for stasis protocols, and once a medic got port access, there was precious little a 'bot could do to cover those protocols. Which didn't mean Jazz wasn't doing every little available to him – whether out of perversity or because special ops hardwiring had kicked in, Ratchet wouldn't have cared to guess as he bludgeoned his way past those defenses to that vulnerable stasis switch...

"Got him! Primus," he swore, disoriented, as he disconnected, still feeling the hot prickle of electrical excess crawling spastically between armor and wiring. Skypax didn't respond: his rotor-blades half-lifted in an agitated fashion, he was speaking rapidly over an emergency line. At length, he cut the call, stared down at Jazz a moment, and then sat back cautiously. His engine gave a low whir when the smaller 'bot simply lay there, unmoving, and Skypax looked over at Ratchet in disbelief.

"You shothim!" he said, sounding almost scandalized.

"He would have shot you," Ratchet countered shortly. His senses were still tingling unpleasantly, but he forced himself to focus on the task at hand, namely scanning Jazz for damage. So far, so good – no sign of internal burn-outs. No spark fluctuation that would've indicated a dangerous failure in surge barriers, not that he'd had any reason to suspect any such occurrence, but still...

"Slagging _glitch_ -make!" the field tech muttered incredulously, and Ratchet vented hard, revving his engine in exasperation.

"It was a taser! He'll be fine inside of an hour," he snapped, aggravated.

This garnered him a look of sheer surprise. "Not _you_ ," Skypax growled, just as a 'bot whose field decal made him a gunnery technician sergeant arrived, one arm transformed into gun mode.

"What happened?" he demanded, as he hurriedly joined them.

"Something for the neuropsychs, I'm guessing. You can stand down, doctor, I'm on it," Skypax said, a little more deferentially, before proceeding to fill the newcomer in. More 'bots were beginning to arrive, among them Flashflare – easily identifiable thanks to his colors – and another medic, Quickstart. Ratchet, after a short time, gave up the battle to keep his position as monitor and simply backed away. It wasn't as if there were a dearth of 'bots to tend to the safely unconscious special ops tech. And indeed, it wasn't long before Quickstart and a 'bot with a heavy infantry decal were lifting Jazz to take him off to the infirmary, presumably. The bulk of the others followed, save for Flashflare and the gunnery tech. Backfire, most likely, Ratchet thought, remembering Skypax's instructions.

Whether or not he was, he gave Ratchet a long look up and down before he said, "You'll need to file an incident report with the base commander's first lieutenant by tomorrow afternoon, doctor."

Wearily, Ratchet nodded. "Thank you, sergeant. I'll do that."

The tech flared his vents out, but then straightened up and said, "It's Ratchet, isn't it?" And when Ratchet nodded, he grunted, holding the rather dispirited medic under an unfathomable gaze before he shook his head. "With a taser, at that!" he muttered, and headed off to his interrupted duties, chuckling to himself as he went. Ratchet stared after him, incredulous.

"Well," Flashflare allowed after a moment, "it looks like you won't have any more problems with the non-coms, at least."

It took him a moment to process that – a moment he probably shouldn't have needed, but Jazz had left him feeling rather scrambled on a number of levels – but when he did, Ratchet protested: "I didn't shoot anyone!"

"Not with a machine gun, no..."

"What the slag was he _thinking_ anyway?" Ratchet demanded, changing the subject, armor flexing outward on a surge of baffled outrage. "What kind of idiot pulls a gun on someone in the middle of an armed _camp_? He slagging faked a medical report to get Skypax to come witness it!"

"That's right, you've never dealt with Jazz before," Flashflare said, vents flaring as he turned to face him. "Don't blow a board trying to figure him out – that 'bot's got more turns than you've got wiring. Don't know how his unit commander manages, but just let him handle Jazz. Meantime, be glad he's gotten decked harder on the practice grounds before. He won't hold your tasering him against you." And when Ratchet spluttered at that, the other medic nudged him along with a shoulder guard. "Come on – I was on my way to refuel when I caught Skypax's broadcast. You might as well join me, since the excitement's over."

Ratchet shook himself, unsettled and still twitchy from electrical transfer, vents flaring again. "No thanks, if I've got a report to write – "

"Come with me, and I'll give you the word on Jazz," wheedled Flashflare. "I'll even give you the highlights on his file, so you don't have to go looking for them."

Ratchet cocked his head at him. "I thought you said I shouldn't bother trying to analyze him...?" He let undertones fade out into a questioning vibrato.

"I said, 'don't blow a board' in the attempt. But," Flashflare said, eyes brightening a bit, "since you've apparently caught his attention, you may as well know what you're dealing with..."


	4. Medical Ethics

It was nearing dawn when the doors to the detention block informally known as the Rowdies' Row opened. Decepticons rarely saw the inside of this particular wing – it was mostly dedicated to holding the Autobots' own troublemakers, and Jazz, who had spent his share of nights in one or another of its holding units, glanced up expectantly.

As he'd anticipated, Flicksaw had been less than pleased with him over this latest... incident. The more so because he'd been implicated in it. "If I'd known what you were intending to do," the CMO had begun by saying. Which was a little disappointing, since Jazz had hardly had to think at all to respond, it was such a familiar opening.

"That's why I don't bother telling you. You wanted an evaluation of your 'bot and none of your lot can act worth scrap, so you asked me to feel him out. It was the right choice. Why worry now about how it got done?" he'd drawled in his most complacent tone, the one designed to get in and grind the CMO's gears.

Flicksaw had given him a very cold look. "That assessment had better be worth my covering you to Prime over this," he'd replied. Jazz hadn't deigned to say anything to that, and Flicksaw had matched his silence, departing the moment he had satisfied himself that his patient had suffered no harm from his little 'adventure.'

But if the CMO had intervened with Prime, that hadn't prevented him, apparently, from throwing Jazz to the mercy of his company commander. "Flicksaw sent me a very interesting account of his afternoon and yours. Most 'bots," said commander had told him, training his floodlights on him in reproof when he'd come to check in on Jazz later that night, "know not to pick a fight with a medic."

"Can't help that they're easy to mess with," had been his unrepentant response. Then: "Flicksaw asked me for help. He knows who I am." A dismissive wave. "If he didn't ask about method, it's because he didn't _want_ to know how I'd go about it. Crack medic, but if he wants to play in my field, he's gotta lose the fear. Not gonna get all sorrowful on his behalf. Besides," he'd added, a little indignantly, "he didn't even ask you if he could borrow me."

"I noticed you didn't bother to forward that request, either," had been Optronix's dry response.

"Didn't want you to worry about it. It was just a psych eval – on base, off the record, quiet-like."

"Need I point out that this quiet evaluation on base ended with you getting knocked out and carried off to the detention wing?" Optronix had asked rhetorically, pinning Jazz with a meaningful stare. Then: "Well? What do you think?"

"Of our pacifist friend?" Jazz had shrugged. "Don't know."

That had gotten him a sharp look and surprised flicker of lights. "You don't know?"

"Nope."

"You put him under a gun, and you didn't know how he would react?"

"Well, he wasn't going to shoot me," Jazz had begun, only to be bluntly contradicted:

"He _did_ shoot you."

"Nah. Taser don't count – it's just electroshock designed to take advantage of primary body shielding. That's always been the last-ditch medical control option. Any ERB 'bot would know that." He'd waved a hand, 'blurring' the air dismissively. "Anyhow, I've been listenin' to people – squad mates, medical brethren, even got a read on Barrage. He's pushin' the mercury, tryin' to get somethin' out of Ratchet – he's convinced the 'bot's got somethin' wrong in the wiring, way he don't respond." Jazz had given a negative flicker of lights. "Trust me, this was the only script to run – closest we can get to seein' how he'd react to the real event, an' that's what Flicksaw needs to know."

"What if he hadn't held to his commitments?" his commander had asked.

"Missin' the point, sir – that ain't so much the problem. He did hold. And he only dropped me 'cause of Skypax. An' _he_ 's fine, right?"

"Skypax?" Optronix had flared his lights briefly brighter. "As far as I know – we spoke briefly and nothing seemed amiss."

"So." Jazz had shrugged in a 'why are we arguing?' fashion. "If Flicksaw's not still cycling frass through his vents, then he's got at least two of the data points he needs."

Optronix's engine had given a weary, subterranean rumble at that, lights dimming somewhat. But then he'd straightened and given Jazz one of his looks. "I want a copy of your incident report _and_ the evaluation you're handing in to Flicksaw," he'd said briskly. "After you get out, we'll discuss them."

"Leavin' me in here, are you?"

"You did Flicksaw a favor on your own time. If you want me to intervene with the MP as your CO, you can tell me what you're up to before it lands you in a cell." Point made, Optronix had told him to get some rest and left him with a promise to come claim him sometime the next day.

Currently, it was just shy of dawn, but Jazz was perfectly happy to count this as 'day', knowing as he did that his CO, orbital native that he was, preferred the early shifts. Not that the Rowdies' Row wasn't a good place to get some down-time in – no access to outside 'casts, no ports, no neighbors, no where to go, and nothing more exciting to do than knock himself into stasis lock by playing touch-and-go with the barrier field – but he wasn't eager to drag it out any longer than necessary, either. His CO knew that, too, and knew better than to let him sit _too_ long, because a twitchy and irritated Jazz was something nobody in his right mind wanted on his hands...

But the 'bot who stepped into view and right up to the warning line painted onto the floor to demarcate Jazz's confinement zone was not Optronix. Jazz tilted his head sideways, and gave a surprised trill. "Here to gloat or you got some charity still in your systems you wanna offload?" he asked of the medic who stood staring at him.

"Neither. Somebody has to run a last check on you before clearing you for discharge, and to get a read-out on your neural lines. It's nothing a half-trained field tech couldn't do, which qualifies me to spare everyone else the pain," Ratchet informed him.

"Ouch, doc," Jazz replied, though he couldn't help but grin. Pacifist or not, this one he could tangle with!

"You're a pain, I'm a puzzle – seems about right, wouldn't you agree?" the other replied, as he crossed the threshold, and Jazz stiffened just a little at the unpleasant electromagnetic whisper that the rippling barrier field created. Ratchet, of course, didn't flinch at all, just gestured for him to come closer so he could run his scans and whatever else.

Jazz obeyed, but not without commenting, "You know, I've probably been in here two or three times since we made planetfall after we blew Priox orbital."

"Somehow, that doesn't surprise me."

"And I gotta say," he continued, "Flicksaw's never run a double check before clearing me."

"Well, you did try to shoot Skypax and me," Ratchet murmured absently, running a scanner over Jazz's chassis and watching his holo-screen's report. Jazz vented – a sharp, slightly disdainful rush of air.

"Wasn't gonna shoot either of you, just for the record," he said, as he turned around, then lowered his head and flexed his shoulders back accommodatingly, so Ratchet could get at the more difficult-to-access neural interface ports that lay just beneath the lip of his dorsal plating. Or more precisely, at the locked-in restraint and monitor 'bolt' currently occupying them so that he'd neither transform anything nor cross the barrier lines nor remove the restraint.

"Pity I didn't know that yesterday," was the response. The two fell silent as Ratchet did a quick query via the bolt, then gave a low hum of irritated surprise. But he said nothing, and Jazz felt him run a scanner down his back to rest a hand just over a secondary access panel, as if wanting another set of readings...

"What?" he asked, when Ratchet let contact and his silence stretch out to the point where they couldn't but be noticed.

"I'm not seeing anything abnormal, but either you're crazy, or your self-defense protocols are distinctly lacking."

Jazz brightened his lights. "There's money on both options, doc, if you're into that sort of thing," he quipped, before taking aim at the opening given him. "Why the notice, though? Yesterday gotcha feelin' a little less than pacific toward me? Tempted to take advantage of your position?" he needled, casting a glance over his shoulder.

"I'm just thinking that someone in your line of work and who's had parts rebuilt as many times as you have should be a little more cautious. Even paranoid," Ratchet answered, sharply.

"You clearly haven't been digging around in my console or lookin' at the classified parts of my psych file."

"I'm a grade three surgeon on probation, not a mind-cracker, in case you hadn't figured that out."

"Oh, I figured. Otherwise, you'd've dropped me without the taser," Jazz replied sagely.

Ratchet's engine gave a low rev that the special ops agent could feel go right up his back, and teeked the other pressing gently over that one apparently sensitive area on his arm. "I don't appreciate being manipulated like that."

"Most 'bots don't," Jazz acknowledged, and though it was a tacit apology if a 'bot were listening for it, it stopped short of any promise to trespass no more on Ratchet's sensibilities.

"Then why do it? Was it really just curiosity?"

Jazz pulsed his electromagnets and shrugged. "You tell me, doc," he replied, then asked in his turn: "Did Flicksaw really send you this morning?"

The two of them fell silent, no doubt each drawing his own conclusions from that little inquisitional stalemate. Finally, Ratchet cycled his vents. The hand on Jazz's back lifted and he felt the tingle of electronics as the medic fiddled once more with the bolt. There was a final, unpleasant little shock, then Ratchet pulled the device carefully free. Jazz vented in relief, running the back of one finger over the area as he stepped away from the medic.

"Thanks, that was starting to – " Jazz began, and then froze. He didn't really need to turn around, because he'd certainly been in the field long enough to know how a gun trained at his back teeked, but he did anyway. Ratchet watched him without expression for a moment, but then said quietly:

"For the record: it's not because I can't, Jazz." And he held him there, until Jazz, at length, nodded. Ratchet nodded back in response, then, without fuss, transformed his arm back into standard mode, though Jazz noted a slight wince, as if something had pinched cabling or rubbed wrong there at the end.

"You know," he said at length, and gestured to the cameras lining the walls, "that's gonna be a really interesting note in your file."

"I'm sure it will be. And I'm sure you'll have something to say about it that should make for even more interesting reading," came the response, and then Ratchet tossed him the deactivated restraining bolt. The special ops agent caught it, held it up and considered it a moment, then cocked his head as he added that reply to the telling lack of klaxons or 'bots dashing in to deal with a weapons violation. He did a few more mental calculations.

"There's no way," he declared, "Flicksaw agreed to this."

Ratchet hesitated for a second, but then shook his head. "No, he didn't," he confirmed, and then turned and began making his way back towards the doors.

"Huh." Jazz stared after him with a burgeoning respect before striding quickly to catch up. And as he drew even and the two of them made their way through the reinforced exit into the 'airlock', he said, "Your file didn't list behavioral or neuropsych specializations."

"I'm not my file. And I'm not just my model or my modifications, either – I should think you, of all people, would know that."

"Point, doc," he acknowledged, respect climbing a notch or two further, as the two of them came at last to the end of the heavily armed corridor. Ratchet petitioned for admittance into the guardroom, and after a moment, the lighting flashed blue. The door before them slid ponderously open.

Over at the monitoring stations, a pair of MPs were having a quiet, if somewhat intense, discussion with another 'bot, and Jazz, upon seeing him, groaned. That got everyone's attention, even as Jazz shook his head and tossed Ratchet a look. "Should've known," he said.

"Good morning, Jazz," his faithless CO greeted him. Then to the MPs: "Make your reports, and route any trouble or inquiries to me," he instructed, waiting just long enough to get somewhat sullen agreement before he gestured to Jazz and Ratchet to follow him and made for the doors.


	5. An Internal Op

Once outside, Jazz demanded: "I know Prime kinda owes you for holding the sky and 'specially Priox as long as you did, Optronix, but you're really gonna explain this to him?"

"You told me yourself that Ratchet is no threat to you or anyone. If I can't trust your word on that, the rest is probably dust, too," his CO replied, mildly. Then turning to Ratchet: "I apologize for Jazz – he likes to hassle the new recruits, and I haven't been able to break him of the habit."

Ratchet stared up at him a moment, then his gaze flicked to Jazz, as he said, "Thank you, commander, though I'm not convinced you're the one who owes the apology."

"Put it down to me being a slagging glitch?" Jazz suggested helpfully.

"Not hardly," was Ratchet's flat, too-knowing response, before continuing in a less terse tone: "I have a report to write for the base commander's lieutenant. At least now I know what I'll be putting in it."

"Do you?" Optronix rumbled.

"Yes." Ratchet and caught Jazz's optics when the special ops tech glanced up. "If there are any further questions, you can ask them directly. Good morning."

So saying, he flashed Optronix the required salute, then turned and stalked stiffly off in the direction of the medical wing, leaving Optronix and Jazz to stare after him. Once he was certain the medic was out of range for easy eavesdropping, Jazz turned to his commander.

"All right, flush it – how'd he convince you to let him fake a medical visit and pull that stunt in the brig?" he demanded.

"He didn't. He wanted a word with you, and I wanted a report from you worth the brig time. It seemed like a fair trade," Optronix replied, and when Jazz gave a disbelieving squawk, asked: "Something the matter, Jazz?"

"You're telling me you let him play that cold? You didn't know what he was planning?"

"Well, I knew he wasn't going to _shoot_ you," came the ever so innocent response, and Optronix chuckled when Jazz swore at him – not for long, and he made sure it ended in a laugh, because it simply couldn't end otherwise, but still…

"Funny," he mused, and shook his head, "how people think _I'm_ the one who takes crazy risks."

His commander just beckoned him to join him as he began walking, and Jazz, after giving himself a final shake, fell in at his side.

"In all seriousness," Optronix said then, "I do trust your judgment. And when I called Ratchet in yesterday evening to get his account of what happened, and he requested permission to speak with you before your release, he didn't strike me as out for revenge of any sort. Clearly, though," he continued, "he felt that your encounter yesterday had left something unaddressed. So I let him play and made certain the guards did, too."

"Prime's gonna just love that!" the special ops 'bot declared, and couldn't help but chortle over it.

"As you said, he owes me for the orbitals and for our part in Praxus afterwards. Besides which, I doubt he has anyone else who deserves you, and I'm not letting you go," Optronix countered. Jazz just gave a soft, resonant hum, and his commander vented gently, before continuing more warningly, "Nevertheless, we both were fortunate that insight proved true in this instance. If it hadn't, you'd be in the infirmary, and I'd be looking at dismissal and reformatting."

"Don't think the Saanakaar orbital contingent would take too kindly to that," Jazz observed. "Been through too much with you to let that just blow through their vents!"

"That's as may be – if he had shot you, there'd be no arguing the point, and if I haven't gotten them disciplined enough to accept an obviously justified ruling, then I _need_ to be dismissed," Optronix declared, with a dark little tonal flourish. "However, he didn't shoot you, as you'd predicted. I trust," he said, and pinned his subordinate with a look, "that that encounter gave you what you needed for Flicksaw?"

"Might just have," Jazz mused, then added: "Thanks for the assist."

"So you have made up your mind about him?"

"Ain't got no use in this war for 'bots who only got principles 'cause they don't got enough in 'em to be able to _want_ to break 'em," he drawled, then flicked his lights and gave his commander a decisive nod. "He'll do."

"And when a firefight finds him?"

"That's always gonna be a gamble, sir – even with us non-medical types. But he stepped up for Skypax, and he seems reasonably ready to use what he's got beside the gun – smart enough to use the taser instead of tryin' to get in my sights for the futile martyrdom of it," Jazz reasoned, and gave his CO a bright-eyed look. "Don't think he'll be throwing himself into enemy fire as a first recourse! Plus, he got you on his side for this morning's little drama. Not bad, either, as an actor – maybe a little limited, but not bad, even if he's torqued in the head." Jazz paused a moment in his thespian meditation. "Reminds me of me!"

Optronix gave a sardonic whine of his engine. "You might consider leaving that last out of your report – in some quarters, that's not a glowing recommendation," he advised.

"So get him for our company, where it is one. We're down to three field techs and no surgeons after Priox orbital and Praxus – could use someone like him."

"You think so?"

"Hey, he's a fully qualified surgeon looking to go where he's needed, namely on combat drops, 'cause doin' no harm in the ERB when his patients are dyin' sixty klicks distant before he can get to 'em ain't good enough for the medical directives that make him a pacifist. 'Bot knows what he wants – ain't afraid to go for it either."

"And after this morning, you'd trust him to have _your_ back?" his commander demanded pointedly.

"Not his job – we take him on, we gotta be clear about that. But we can deal, an' if we can deal, I'm betting so can he," he replied.

"I didn't ask for a non-sequitur, Jazz," his CO replied with deceptive mildness.

"Look, he stood up under threat of bein' fragged for inflicting a pacifist on the lot of us. He tasered the special ops tech holdin' him up to protect a comrade," Jazz argued urgently. "Not content with that, he later formed a gun on the same special ops 'bot in a detention ward, in full view of cameras, to answer a point of debate _and_ he conspired with and failed to disclose to a senior officer to do it – that's good enough for me, and it ain't even been a full day since we got introduced. Whether he sticks to his directives or not, you seriously think he's gonna last in any other unit but ours?" he demanded.

"There is that," Optronix acknowledged, seeming to linger on the idea a moment. "Even if he gets off that probation roster, he'll still have to go through the IF-SSR upgrade, and that could take a year. We'll be back up to operational status as a company before then."

"Think he might surprise a lot of us. Flicksaw gave me his record – the whole thing. He's pretty quick to adapt an' you know, sometimes need don't wait for us to get everything together."

"I've seen the same record. He's got a lot more to adapt to than almost anyone else in our company, and even if he will not fight, he still will have more of our lives in his hands than anyone save the command element and the Decepticons. That would be a lot to risk by rushing him through that reconfiguration, and that leaves aside how configuration may affect conviction and sanity." Optronix flickered his lights, though, and gave Jazz a nod after a moment. "Still, I'll consider it – on one condition."

"What's that?"

"That you convince him that he wants the slot. You, personally – not a proxy."

Jazz blinked, gave a startled little chirrup. "Got a feeling, commander, that he'll answer me with 'no'."

"Then he's not for us unless Prime so decides," was the reply. And when he would've protested, his CO drew him to a halt, and said, "We're short on medics – everyone knows that. But there are some available, and I have two of them on a list already. I'll add him to it despite his commitments and the delay a reconfiguration will add to his joining us on the strength of your recommendation and this morning's performance. But if you want him on the _top_ of that list, you need to get him to ask for it."

"But – "

"Jazz." That singular warning tone stopped him cold.

"Yes, sir?"

"There are quite a few 'bots who wonder why I tolerate you, given your behavior and your propensity for wreaking spectacular havoc on missions that leave you wanting a few body parts. Do you know why I do?"

"'Cause a junior station controller who gets himself in position to dictate terms to Prime on orbital defense is about as glitched as I am?" he hazarded, since truth occasionally worked well as a defense.

"Because you could do my job if you wanted it. You just don't want it, and I'm inclined to think that you'd be wasted in it, which is why," Optronix said, a little more severely, "I put up with you sabotaging your chances of promotion at strategic intervals."

"I don't _need_ the rank to do what I do," the special ops tech defended himself.

"Not to infiltrate and undermine, no," Optronix replied, but gave him one of those looks that promised that this was not the last word on that subject. Then: "I've said I trust your judgment, and I do, but not without reservation. You were right about Ratchet holding to principle, but you got played by Flicksaw, and that gives me pause."

"How do you figure _Flicksaw_ – ?" Jazz began, a little indignantly.

"You said it yourself, Jazz," his commander answered implacably. "He knew who he was asking for the favor. He knew you weren't bound by the limits his neuropsychs are, and that asking you instead of some other special ops 'bot meant he need not worry that he would ever be confronted with the necessity of your 'script'. Because if there's one thing you won't risk, Jazz, it's getting overruled in your area by someone like Flicksaw, so you kept the assignment in confidence to ensure he'd never throw the breakers. You made certain he'd never be forced to be more involved than he wanted to be. He was counting on that, and you didn't disappoint." Optronix gave a sequential flicker of lights – the luminous equivalent of a shrug. "I can't blame him entirely – he _is_ a medic, and it's a clever resolution to that directive conflict war puts on them. You, however, can't afford to operate on that sort of split vision. You were lucky it was Flicksaw, and not one of your contacts in Polyhex."

Optronix let him dwell on that for a few moments, then continued, "I intend to have a word with the CMO today about going behind my back to manipulate one of my 'bots into a task that entailed actions that he wouldn't have authorized himself. I will also assure him that I have your word that you will henceforth avoid all such private favors."

Jazz vented gently, recognizing a prompt when it was fed to him. "Yes, sir – no private favors. You won't know me from a drone."

"I don't need a drone in this matter, I need you to conclude the op," Optronix countered. "If Ratchet is truly worth the risk of his medical commitments to take on for the rest of the company, then you'll convince him to put his name on that list and trust me this time to find a way to convince Prime to honor that request. Otherwise, we write this one down as a one-time favor to the CMO and you will abide by its terms and cease to pry into Ratchet's affairs. Do you understand your assignment, Jazz?"

With a cycle of vents, Jazz flashed a rueful, if wry, affirmative. "Think I do, sir," he replied softly.

Most commanders wouldn't have accepted that as an answer, but then again, as Jazz had happily discovered back when things had merely been _going_ to scrap, Optronix was not most commanders. His CO just gave him a nod after a moment, and said, "Then you're free to go. I want your reports – all of them related to yesterday's incident and this morning's – in my message queue by noon."

"Yes, sir." Satisfied that they'd reached an understanding, Optronix left him then, heading in the direction of base command for what was undoubtedly going to be a most unpleasant interview with Sentinel Prime.

Which left him with a charge still to fulfill, for all he'd thought his task finished, save for the required write-ups. There were, Jazz reflected, as he made an about face and began the trek to the medical wing, some 'bots who wondered what under Cybertron's two moons kept someone as glitched and wayward as he was bound to Optronix as surely as a symbiont. There were many others who assumed it was just hard-wired survival coding – a sort of lopsided repayment to the only commander who would have him, let alone let him get away with some of his nonsense.

Personally, Jazz had a little more respect for those who wondered than for those who made crass assumptions about his motives – as if he'd been letting hard-wired coding run him since he'd left Kolkular all those many years ago! As if he'd been following automatic survival coding since he'd drifted Megatron's way back before anyone had been saying 'war', or for that matter, since they'd begun saying it. But a healthy incomprehension was in the end no closer to discovering the truth than the theories of those who thought they understood him, because the speculators were uniformly content not to test their speculation.

Had the partisans of either position actually bothered to ask him, they might have been surprised by his answer. It was a little-known art that his CO possessed, one that Jazz had never mastered himself, and so stood in need of the rare other who had, but Optronix had an unerring ability to remind even him, from time to time, that shame could unburden a 'bot of himself like nothing else could.

 _And who doesn't need that these days?_ he thought, and then put it all aside. For he had a mission to complete, and he'd be sorry for it to end in less success than its first act had...


	6. Backline Duty

Anyone with functioning reason would have anticipated that forming a weapon on an incarcerated field tech with whom he had already had one altercation could only incite the most serious of inquiries from the command element.

Of course, anyone with functioning reason probably wouldn't have formed a weapon on an incarcerated field tech with whom he had already had an altercation in the first place.

However, what logic would not tolerate, life did. Ratchet, who had indeed formed a weapon on Jazz in a jail cell, was therefore not caught by surprise, either by the sudden influx of mandatory legal forms to be filed, or by the inevitable string of hearings and dress-downs. Nor did he bother to ponder the nature of rational agency – he was too busy answering questions.

For the base's first lieutenant wanted the details about Jazz attacking him, and Flicksaw had several pointed questions about the use of medical pretext. A disciplinary board interrogated him about threatening Jazz, and the Prime himself called him in to explain Optronix's role in all of it. Barely had he weathered all the inquiries into the nature of 'the incidents', and the precise degree of responsibility he might or might not bear, than the neuropsych division and his assessment board had descended upon him to subject him to a battery of tests that had left him feeling rather thoroughly violated, to say nothing of sore – both of which were something of an accomplishment, given Barrage's tender mercies.

But all of that was to be expected, and since Ratchet was not an advocate of general chaos and lawlessness, he submitted to all such measures without protest and just focused on getting through the daily allotment of grind.

"You're sure you're okay about all this?" Amtek asked him at one point, during a pause in target practice.

"I'm fine," Ratchet answered, considering his own shot grouping – up twenty percent in accuracy. He frowned, even as Amtek's engine whined.

"You always say that."

"It's always true."

Except of course when it wasn't, though he wasn't about to talk about it; not with his squad mates, not even Amtek, who was decent enough company, even if not close.

For he could not but notice a certain patterned discrepancy in the week that followed his little 'encounter' with Jazz. Despite the seriousness of the inquiries he was faced with, after his first meeting with the disciplinary board, no one came to escort him to hearings.

There were no MPs insisting on bunking across the hall from him in the medical recovery wards.

He was banned from leaving the base, but his movements otherwise were no more restricted than they had been.

There had been a total of two minor inquiries into his new habit of ending his day on the targeting ranges, but once the MPs had confirmed with Flashflare that he was responding to medical advice, it was never an issue again.

Nobody blocked his comm line; he wasn't subjected to increased electronic access code security.

Where medical ethics were concerned, though Flicksaw's reprimand had been sharp, it fell short of being severe, which in Ratchet's opinion would've been entirely merited. But severity wasn't forthcoming. He seemed to exist under no real or lasting opprobrium. With the notable exception of his squad mates, no one avoided him, either in the halls or on the targeting ranges.

Indeed, of a sudden, he had mail: within twelve hours of tasering Jazz, he had about ten messages in his queue from various gunnery sergeants on base, all offering their expertise should he desire to improve his marksmanship. Within forty-eight hours of the "incident" in the cell, he had twenty more as the gossip line did its work, and the range sergeants made a point of stopping by to offer their professional advice.

Apparently, Flashflare had been right about the non-coms warming to him.

That was... disconcerting. So were the looks he was getting – even if, as Jazz had said, he was expecting them. His squad mates in basic in particular were eying him askance.

More than askance, really: if they had been dismayed before by his general inability to raise a weapon, they were furious now. Either they thought he'd been playing games with them, and Jazz had called him on it, or else they figured that he'd broken with his governing directive, and so ought to have no qualms about Barrage's exercises, and consequently were disgusted that he remained as incapable of firing on someone as before. Ratchet wasn't sure which it was, only that his explanation – that disruptive shock was in regular medical use for unsafe patients, and so hardly counted as shooting someone – had gone over about as well as a Decepticon air raid.

Well of course it had. None of the others were medics. They had no essential reason to object to the idea of matching threat for threat, force for force; they might not have been made for war initially, but that pacific directive wasn't built into them the way it was built into medics, and they'd all been modified anyway, some of them heavily. Like Torqueline, who probably should put in to outgrade to one of the Krex model tanks, or armored attack carriers – something! Before the patch-work upgrades backfired on him, preferably. Ratchet would even sign off on it, despite the risk to his own person a tanked-out Torqueline might pose on the practice grounds.

Point being, he couldn't honestly claim he didn't understand their hostility and confusion. He did. Ratchet, enduring the unfriendly looks each day on the shooting range, was quietly grateful most of them weren't violent in their contempt, that a few like Amtek were more disappointed than disdainful.

He did wonder, though, that no one seemed to worry about Jazz in the slightest – indeed, he was getting the distinct impression that most everyone was amused, if not a little bit pleased, by the fact that he'd tasered him. Certainly no one was insisting Ratchet answer for the special ops tech, not even the Saanakaar contingent, who seemed to be a very tight-knit cohort.

Evidently, there was something about Jazz...

There _had_ to be. After all, there could be no other explanation for how, ten days later, Ratchet ended up with nothing more than a pair of warnings on his file – one for a third class weapons violation, another for 'unfraternal conduct' – and a week's worth of medical scrap yard duty. Medical scrap analysis wasn't even much of a punishment, all things considered: granted, it wasn't pleasant sifting through broken, burned out parts and trying to determine which were worth reworking, while imagining all the different ways in which they might have come to be broken and burned out. But it was a useful, necessary, absorbing medical task, one that made good use of his diagnostic skills and his study of the munitions databases.

"I should think you would be pleased," Flashflare remarked, as the pair of them worked through the salvageable parts, repairing them for reuse whenever the next battle should find them.

"I'm doing salvage work with hand-helds," Ratchet replied, undertones grating on each other.

"Not to pun, but you are pretty handy with them," quipped his brother; "Enough practice, you might not know the difference."

Ratchet gave that the glare it deserved. "If it comes to that, you can strip me down for scrap because I'll have lost the ability to discriminate by then!"

"Ratchet – "

"You wouldn't risk using dead tools unless you had neural damage, Flashflare. Slagging hand-helds are anesthetic," he said disdainfully; "We know our own bodies and how they function and feel. I know how my patients feel to me when I treat them – it's _my_ body and _my_ transformation, and I don't need the fragging numbers on a screen to tell me a damn thing! With hand-helds, I'll likely end up burning a hole through somebody's chassis with a welder because I can't tell when the official safety regs aren't precise enough!" Flashflare chuffed, but then gave a dismissive trill.

"You'll adapt." And to Ratchet's disgruntled, vibratory hum: "All right, you'readapt _ing_ , then. You're doing better on the ranges, aren't you?"

"And holding steady in the medically useless category."

"'Hampered' is not the same as 'useless.' And in any case, adaptation wasn't the issue, and you know it."

"What makes you think I'm not pleased with the verdict?" Ratchet asked after a moment.

Flashflare's undertones flared softly, and he flicked his lights as he scrutinized a carbon scrubber that looked borderline reparable. "What doesn't?" he retorted. "But if you want reasons, let's see... for one, you're stiff around anyone with command rank. Or any rank up from junior tech. Or who rotates through the MPs. For another, you're still running a couple degrees hotter than spec-norms, like you're constantly on edge. You _are_ jumpier than usual. And – you can't possibly think this is salvageable." That last being addressed as much to the converter regulator Flashflare had picked up from the to-be-recovered pile as to Ratchet.

"Give me that," Ratchet ordered, holding out his hand for the part. It _was_ rather in sorry shape, with a crack that wouldn't take solder, and hardly the most promising thing he'd pulled out of the fritz bin, but it also wasn't the worst. "It's as salvageable as that jerry-rigged excuse for a targeting array you passed for recycling."

"We make do," Flashflare rumbled, reciting the unofficial mantra of the Autobot medical corps.

"So I'm told," Ratchet replied, sourly. "Talk about 'hampered', just look at the lot of us – half of the base personnel are tasked with work they aren't adapted for, using improvised supplies that are subpar and numbers and quality!" He gave a sardonic flare of undertones. "And they wonder why the neuropsychs are so busy since the war began!"

Flashflare, who'd likely heard such complaints daily since getting his decals, and undoubtedly had complained himself, merely trilled patient acknowledgment, but no more than that. For a time, they worked quietly together, until Flashflare set aside the part he was working on.

"What's the problem, Ratch?" he asked, cajoling. "Come on, I'm your brother. We work together – slaggit, I work _on_ you, that's got to count for something!"

"It's not that it doesn't," Ratchet was quick to assure him.

"Then what's your problem with command? Most 'bots wouldn't question a gift like that – which your sentence is, you know."

Ratchet revved gently. "This whole affair," he said quietly, and with feeling in every word, "is highly irregular, Flashflare, in every aspect."

"But it could've been worse."

"I'm not convinced it isn't."

His brother gave a worried little trill. "Because of your squad mates?"

"Because I don't trust the resolution," Ratchet answered, tension rife in the quiet of his undertones. "Not even with Prime's name on it." He shook his head. "If this is justice, there's a problem; and if it isn't, there's still a problem. Either way," he concluded darkly, "this isn't over."

Flashflare gave him a look, but let it go in the end, for which Ratchet was grateful. For it had required no special prescience to conclude as he had: he had already begun to be aware, in the past few days, of a certain silvery presence lurking about. He had no idea what penalty Jazz had been given, but whatever it was, it had apparently left him enough freedom to stalk hapless medics.

And "stalk" was the operative word. Ratchet, intent on solving some puzzle, or distracted by his own lingering discomfort after a long day on the practice grounds, literally catching flak from teammates, would catch a sudden, bright flash of silver out the corner of an eye or the trailing edge of some joke told just a little too loudly, and look up to find Jazz on his way to somewhere else, occasionally with company. He never caught the other staring, but just the fact that he caught him at all smacked of ostentation. A very calculated ostentation, one that paraded as a kind of paradoxical subtlety, to be sure, but clearly, the special ops tech wanted Ratchet to notice him despite the sensor dampeners Jazz obviously was using, or he would've kept more of a distance – it wasn't as if he didn't know how, of that Ratchet was quite certain.

Which meant he probably ought to expect round two to occur in the near future, much as he didn't much care for the notion, and particularly not for the notion of being driven into it like a drone on a track. The reasonable response would probably be to bring the matter to someone's attention – Flashflare's, perhaps, who would likely advise him to talk with the base's first lieutenant again, or the MPs. They would deal with Jazz, if it became necessary – that was their function.

Yet he wasn't going to. Not that he was a usurper of others' functions, but their initial clash had given him a measure and an insight, and he wouldn't have walked into a cell and formed up on Jazz if he'd thought the MPs or base lieutenant had any more sway with Jazz than ice did with fire. His study of Jazz's record after the fact had simply confirmed him in that belief, for nothing in his file, which had a long and amazingly diverse list of disciplinary actions tagged to it, suggested the 'bot had any particular fear of punitive measures.

So he wouldn't be going to the MPs. The MPs didn't have a place in this. Not yet.

Thus despite a healthy wariness, he was beginning to contemplate the idea of taking the bait and confronting the 'bot himself when the Decepticons hit Nova Cronum.

The distress call came blaring in one night, an hour into a fierce firefight on Praxus's eastern perimeter that had sent the Autobots stationed there scrambling for cover. Whoever had sent that call out had put it on the Autobot all-call channel, and for a few searingly clear seconds that signal had sung like a siren: just enough time to give a call-sign, identify the threat and a direction, before it abruptly cut out.

Ratchet and Flashflare, who, like all the other back-line medics, had been shuttling parts to and from inventory and prepping medical stations in anticipation of the inevitable Praxus casualties, looked at each other in dismay, then over at Quickstart, who'd been working with them.

"Damn," Flashflare swore. "Wonder if Praxus was a feint. Maybe they've been aiming for Nova Cronum all along!"

"Isn't it a bit much to make an entire city a feint?" Ratchet asked skeptically.

"You'd be surprised," Flashflare replied, even as Quickstart said:

"Flicksaw just changed ward assignments to handle the jump in casualties," he reported to his colleagues, whose intra-optical-projection HUDs had begun flashing a personnel alert. Quickstart gave a soft chirp, then looked at his brethren: "He's stripped the mediate triage wards – pulled the techs out to assist in surgery so he can spread the rest of his surgical rotation out."

"And we get to hold down two triage wards, just the three of us," Flashflare said, vents flaring, then tagged Ratchet with a comm laser. "Looks like you're with me – let's do a final check of ward six."

Ratchet's engine revved on the back of a minor surge of energy that came of a rather heat-soaked anxiety. But he vented the warmth and quickly banished the feeling – there was no time for it, as he obediently followed Flashflare down the hall towards their assigned ward.

The final check of ward six proved uneventful, happily, and Flashflare painted it blue on the medical hub – _ready to receive._

"We should still have about fifteen minutes before we start taking in casualties from Praxus," he judged, and tipped his head towards the door. "Let's hit the commons while we have the chance. With Nova Cronum on the line, and all of us spread thin, we'll need all hands for as long as we can run."

That turned out to be a wise recommendation. Ratchet was hardly a novice, and knew in many ways what to expect when a major civilian center was hit, but before, he had been one of the civilians. He had worked an overloaded ERB that still had enough medics to fully staff every station if it skimped on rotations.

But though Iacon's ERB was receiving patients out of Nova Cronum as well, still, the military ERB was taking far more wounded than it could truly handle – just because there wasn't really a choice. With aerial teams flying wounded in from Nova Cronum on top of military med-evacs from Praxus, he barely had time to think, and the idea of stepping away for a quick break and refueling or a little sensory relief went up in the smoke and broken bodies of two blasted cities.

And although technically he was Flashflare's subordinate, with only two of them working an overcrowded triage ward, they could afford no neatly hierarchical division of labor. From the first, they'd simply split the bay, with Ratchet taking one side and Flashflare the other, both of them patching armor, staunching ruptured fluid lines, and jerry-rigging neural cabling or bracing damaged support structures to hold just long enough.

 _Incoming,_ Flashflare advised, a moment before blinding magnesium floodlights and the core-rattling thrum of several dozen hoverpods by the bay docking doors announced the arrival of yet another small fleet of air lift field techs with their patients. _I've got a rad leak or something worse over here – can you take these?_

 _Just tell me their converters are intact,_ Ratchet sent back, as he grabbed a ripped energon line above the tear in both hands, transforming his left hand into a clamp to stop the leak. His right hand he ran back up the line to the injector. When he failed twice to make the clamp transformation on his right hand, he snarled a curse, then simply squeezed as tightly as he could, releasing and reforming his left hand so he could reverse the injector valve. His patient's engine gave a pained, stuttering whine as systemic pressure spiked, but Ratchet cleared the tube, cut circulation, and pulled the damaged line with little concern for how unpleasant backflushing energon lines felt. He grabbed an undamaged line and quickly set to work getting it in place, even as he told Flashflare: _Send them my way. If you've got a rad leak, you've got bigger problems than my patients do._

Not that his patients didn't have serious problems. Ratchet paused, leaning as unobtrusively as possible on the edge of the berth's frame, peripherally aware of the red-lined readings on his holoscreen correlating with what he teeked in the scan of his patient's motor cabling and central neural column. He checked his chronometer: fifty-three hours. He'd been on shift fifty-three hours, and he honestly had no notion when that might change.

His current patient alone would need hours of work. Energon damage was never pretty though at least it wasn't usually fatal. His own hands ached from the energon that inevitably got past the chemical rinse medics used to give the volatile stuff something to bind with other than their own armor and tensors. Flexing stiff fingers, he considered trying to clear some of the hardened, energon-corroded dross from around the neural column, but after a moment rejected the notion. Even without the minor damage to his hands, he couldn't truly feel what he was doing with a hand-held the way he did when he _was_ the plasma-cutter. Factor in that even some of the tool-transformations he could normally do were giving him problems, and...

"You'll hold," he muttered, and locked his patient into stasis. No point in making the poor 'bot suffer more than he already had. As the berth's shock frame swiveled upright and retracted into its row of life racks, support monitors swiveling out and blinking to life, he turned his attention to the new arrivals and began directing the DC teams and air lift field techs towards life-rack berths on his side of the bay.

"What do we have?" he demanded, as the med-evacs hauled the most recent disasters towards him. Already, his sensors teeked some seriously unstable and unhealthy signatures and EM readings; the victims were missing armor plates and limbs, had heat warpage, buckled structure, and shrapnel punctures, and even having been recently up to his elbows in someone's damaged converter and fuel system, the free-flowing energon was strong enough to sting in overtaxed chemoceptors.

"Gunnery platform crew," the lead medical field tech reported brusquely. "Their shield overloaded."

"Cluster munitions?" Ratchet ventured to guess, as he helped lock one of the hapless 'bots into a berth frame, told the computer his model, and watched support monitors snake over him.

"Mark Four Nova class clusters," the tech specified. "Blew their mount, too: the cartridge exploded – "

"And that, plus the bleed from the shield, overwhelmed their safeties and ignited their own personnel-mounted munitions," Ratchet supplied the grim conclusion. That explained the explosive back-blow and internal burn and shredding he was seeing on the remains of limbs, and he assumed anyone with a ventral or dorsal gun mount either hadn't survived the initial blast or else had been declared unsalvageable by the primary triage team.

"Exactly," the tech replied, and held out an arm so that Ratchet could link up through exposed ports. "Transferring triage sit-rep."

"Received," Ratchet said after just a moment. The tech nodded, flashed a salute, then he and his brethren headed out to return to the killing fields. Ratchet stood still a moment, digesting the triage codes and matching up profiles with the 'bots laid out before him. Damn, but this was going to be messy! _Not a slagging one of them are standard build any more_ , he thought, resigned in his disgust.

"Get me energon lines," he told one of the DC techs. "And if we still have any of the Trin-series neural cabling, bring that, too – Dag-series if you can't find any. Cabinet oh-two-seven."

"Yes, sir."

"Slagging cross-purposed upgrades," he muttered, even as he found his priority two and dove in, trying to map what damage had done to non-standard organization.

He'd managed to stabilize his first patient and was moving on to the next when Flashflare commed him urgently:

 _Do you have any catalytic pumps?_

 _I had to use mine on some poor slagger who stepped on a Helix mine,_ and _I'm going to run out of Trin-series cabling over here._

 _Fraggit, we've got a problem,_ was the response.

 _Your runaway rad readings are that bad?_

Flashflare didn't answer him directly, but Ratchet caught the post on the medical hub, which, along with its brethren from other wards, scrolled down the side of his HUD with amber intensity:

 _Logistics, this is ward six. I've got four code twos rapidly approaching code one status: I've got damage to Tri-hyd internal power units; it looks as though the barrier between circulation and processing was breached. They've got heavily irradiated fragments cycling through their systems, causing temperature spikes and degraded system self-regulation. We need a set of catalytic pumps to deal with the effects, now!_

 _Logistics, ward two. I've got a line of 'bots who need a set of conductor replacements to keep power flow going, and all I have are old Travex units that won't get the post-Travex model code threes through to reconstructive surgery. They're set to run too hot t–_

 _This is ward six again. If I can't get the chemical reaction from the radiation under control, it's going to be a chain reaction that will –_

 _Logistics, this is ward four, Darklight calling – I've been waiting on a resupply of converter calibrators for the last hour –_

 _We understand the gravity of the situation,_ the 'bot on Logistics' comm replied, overriding everyone in short-tempered red-lined glyphs. _We will resupply as we are able, and in order of priority._

Across the room, Flashflare slammed a fist into the wall, on the pretext of "coaxing" a balky, overheated scanner to work.

 _Are their internal rad-shields intact?_ Ratchet demanded, seeing in his mind's eye a horrific vision of the chaos that the failure of those shields would cause. Flashflare and anyone who'd had touch contact with them would have immediately to go through decontamination, they'd have to isolate a quarter of the ward, and they'd have to tag everyone who had been treated by the contaminated medics or been within range of them for more than an hour.

 _They're intact,_ Flashflare confirmed, but before Ratchet could give vent to relief, added darkly, _but we're not getting those parts. If we've got them anywhere in Logistics, they're going straight to the surgical wards or maybe even back to Iacon._

 _If they've got a breach to those power units, and irradiated Tri-hyd fragments that've broken loose are being processed through their energon lines, they're not going to_ _ **last**_ _to surgery unless we get those pumps, to say nothing of anything else we need!_ Ratchet protested.

 _I know,_ Flashflare replied, grimly, and Ratchet, sensing the pull of frustrated resignation in the other, growled softly.

 _They can't expect us to keep these 'bots alive and functioning on will alone!_

 _No, they don't,_ was the unsettling response. Then: _I'm initiating isolation procedures on our four code twos and mandating decontamination for anyone who has touch-contact with the affected systems going forward._

Ratchet hissed through his vents. _You're writing them off._

 _It's a triage ward, and I'm fragging well going to write up the field techs who brought them in – they should've tagged them unsalvageable,_ Flashflare replied flatly, though with manifest unhappiness _._ But after a moment: _Give Logistics another try for me, will you? Send your list in as well and update as necessary. Do the best you can; I'm going to try to insert shielding and isolate their cores – that'll buy them a few hours._

With that, Flashflare shut his comm line off before Ratchet could so much as acknowledge the order. Not that he cared for such formalities at the moment, consumed as he was with the burning question: How to shake supplies free of Logistics? They weren't responding to triage, and Ratchet didn't much feel like trying to repair badly injured soldiers while having a running argument. He particularly didn't want to have that argument if he was going to lose. Ratchet glanced around the room full of patients, in varying states of disrepair and disorientation, and came to a decision. Flashflare might not like it; Logistics would probably hate it, but he didn't care – he was, after all, just following orders.

"You, and you – yes, you two," he beckoned a pair of 'bots with cracked, burned armor, and shredded weapons systems, but whom his scans ranked as walking wounded. The moment they limped into range, he grabbed the nearest by the arm, found an uplink port and connected, ignoring the other's twitch of surprise. "I'm deputizing you as EMTs," he informed them. "Medical inventory is sector two dash six. You give them this list – filename Triage 6 – and you get what I need if you have to bribe the Logistics crew to do it. I don't care what they tell you – get it done," he ordered. "Go!"

"Yessir," they said, and credit to them, limped away without argument. _Pain,_ he thought darkly, as he began moving towards his next patient, _the great motivat –_

And then a shock wave slammed into him on a boil of noise and static.


	7. First Do No Harm - Revisionist

When next vision cleared, he was in the dark, on the floor, cycling dust and heat through his vents. Dazedly, he lay there, twitching now and again when the live ends of the tangle of wires covering him touched his armor – it appeared that what had actually struck him was most of the wall as it had come down. _What the frag...?_

 _Ratchet?_ Flashflare's icon flashed on his HUD, alarm writ brightly in red-lined glyphs as bursts of gunfire and cries sounded. Another explosion rocked the wards, triggering a new alert from ward five: _MEDIC DOWN… MEDIC DOWN…_

 _Ratchet, do you copy? What's your status?_ Flashflare commed him again, and this time, he managed to reply:

 _Blue,_ he posted, if somewhat uncertainly. _I think._

 _'You think'!?_

 _I'm fine._ He was, if not fine, at least moving, which ought to prove the truth or lie of half-stunned claims quickly enough. _Responding to report of medic down in ward five_.

With a soft, pained whine of his engine, Ratchet managed to push himself up, half crawling, half shoving his way out from under the remains of the wall, and dragging his surgical kit with him. Lights flickered as he rose amid the huddled forms of shocked, wounded soldiers. Still rather dazed – _Electrical overload,_ some part of his mind calmly informed him – he nevertheless found himself scrambling through the gap between wards, head ringing with the echoes of what sounded like an air raid passing through. He shuddered as a torn wire discharged, recoiling before the swirls of ionization, and then half tumbled over rubble and into the darkness next door.

Smoke and ozone assaulted his senses, and the air was all confusion, a dizzying, shifting field of unstable electrical charge and horribly disrupted energy signatures from injured 'bots, pierced by the staccato drum of weapons fire. Debris glowed with infrared brilliance, and the roof gaped open to the night sky...

"Doctor!" someone hissed.

Ratchet whirled, and amid the haze, a pair of blue optics glowed dimly – evidently the speaker was injured, or else simply trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, and he seemed somehow familiar... With a sharp shake of his head, Ratchet scrambled his way over on all fours, trying to stay below the small war that appeared to have erupted, as some 'bots fired back at whoever had put a missile through the wall and ceiling. Not that they appeared to be having any effect on the shooter.

 _What the slag model_ is _that?_ he wondered, and then wondered how under the double moons someone had been stupid enough to pull the restraining bolt before whatever damage to memory or recognition programming had been repaired. Short of accidentally bringing a 'Con in or somebody going trigger-mad, there could be no other explanation for this kind of chaos. But explanation would have to be postponed – the faint, failing signature from the shattered 'bot the other was crouched over was so degraded and weak, he only picked it up in the last meter or so, and he almost didn't recognize it. It made the shock decidedly worse when he did.

 _Quickstart?_ he sent through the comm, but got nothing back. "Status," he snapped, forcibly setting disorientation aside as he scanned the damage, and he felt his insides go hollow and cold.

"I don't know – bad. Ratchet, I'm not a medic!" the 'bot protested, and Ratchet shook himself hard enough to rattle his armor as the voice finally let him put a name to the signature.

"Amtek?"

"Yeah – I'm on damage control this shift." Damage control. Of course, because no triage ward had had more than one medic on it, save ward six. _But I'm all ward five has now, and I'm stuck using slagging hand-helds, Primus fraggit!_ he thought _,_ feeling a moment of icy panic grip him before the habits of a lifetime slammed a steel mental barrier between it and thought.

"Converter breach, and multiple system burn-out," he reported in a low voice, already cataloguing the list of procedures they'd need to undertake just to get Quickstart somewhere within shouting distance of stable. Conscious of the silence across the way, he added: "Give me a run down on what's around us, DC."

"There's... not a lot left around us. We lost a row of life-racks. Some others are damaged, but I think they're holding on their individual back-ups. I don't teek anyone else nearby, I... I don't think they made it."

"What happened?"

"I don't know. One minute, everything was fine. The next I'm flat out, staring at the ceiling, and Quickstart was down, half crushed under some of this. I think he must've taken the hit directly, or else – w-what are you doing?" Amtek interrupted himself to ask, when Ratchet half lunged across Quickstart's body to grab an arm and pull the 'bot closer.

"There's damage to his spark chamber – I've got to get a line in for power, and you're an easy four on the triage listing," Ratchet informed him, even as he opened a panel and pulled a cable. Amtek hissed as power discharged into the air, eyes flickering, but Ratchet ignored him, hooking the line into the nearest emergency power port on Quickstart's spark-chamber.

"That will hold him for a little while," he muttered. But it wouldn't hold him forever, even if the rest of the damage didn't kill him, and so he opened a line to Flashflare.

 _Please tell me you have a spark chamber patch kit left,_ he said, without preamble.

 _I'm down to two, and both are slated to be used just as soon as I can clear internal debris_ , Flashflare replied, as Ratchet manually triggered fail-safes on several energon injector points. _What's your status over there?_

 _I'm pinned down and I need a patch kit,_ Ratchet said grimly. _How bad is ward six?_

 _Half the bay's blown. Listen, I'm going to redirect traffic from five and six, and I'm going to get you some help. Flicksaw must have_ someone _he can –_

 _That he can send down here to play target for this glitch_? Ratchet's vents cycled derisively, for all the other couldn't see them. _Don't bother – I'll do for now. It's not as if we can get to anyone else anyway._

So saying, he closed the line, and the door, on any objections. Not that he couldn't answer them, but Quickstart needed his full attention. Even without his holoscreen up, he was teeking an absolute mess – heat damage, electrical damage, blown circuitry, a circulatory system that was trying to shut down, cracked structure and detritus _everywhere_...

"He doesn't need a patch kit, he needs slagging life support," he revised.

"We're full up _,"_ his squad mate protested past the noise of another outbreak of gunfire.

"I can see that!" Ratchet snapped, and flinched when a number of rounds buried themselves in the remains of the wall overhead. "Where are the slagging MPs, anyway?"

"I did call them – they should be coming."

"Not soon enough," Ratchet growled, racking his mind for ideas. He glanced around the ward again – was there _any_ open berth he could see? – and then his gaze fell upon a set of cabinets at the end of the room.

"Amtek," Ratchet said, and nodded towards the cabinets illuminated by dim emergency lighting. "Think hard – did Quickstart ever open those cabinets? Did he ask you or anyone to get something from them?"

"I... don't know. I don't think so," he qualified hastily in the face of Ratchet's stare. "Why?"

"Because I helped prep this ward, and there should be a portable core support unit stored in them," he replied, feeling a tiny thrill of hope. That might work, he thought. At least until something opened up – or until they could move Quickstart safely to another ward that had a free berth.

Cautiously, Ratchet eased forward to peer around the debris that shielded them, looking down the long, rubble-strewn aisle between rows of life-racks, calculating the odds.

"What's his model?" he asked Amtek after a moment, checking the charge on his pulse-taser. At this distance, and with the other injured, if his armor weren't too heavy...

"I'm really not very familiar with the medical models – "

"Not Quickstart's, our shooter's," Ratchet interrupted, impatient. "What's _his_ model?"

This time, there was no hesitation. "Heavy infantry Litix model, third generation."

Which made him a tank. _Wonderful_ , Ratchet thought.

"Ratchet," Amtek said urgently, even as light spilled into the ward from a hallway, and the air rang with shouts of "MPs – hold your fire – "

" _Down!_ "

Ratchet didn't know who said it, but no one questioned the warning. The blow-back from the missile launched at the MPs slammed into him, pelted him with fragments, rattled him to the core, and left him venting heat. Beside him, Amtek gave a skittery little whine of his engine, undertones skewed to minors.

"Fraggit!" he swore, sounding more than a little shaken – in fact, he sounded positively shaky.

Ratchet uncurled and scanned the other, quickly homing in on a good-sized piece of shrapnel that'd lodged in the gap in his ventral plating – the gap _Ratchet_ had opened when he'd pulled that panel free to get a line into Quickstart. The 'bot himself, in the dim lighting, was staring down in shock at the shard and at the electrical discharge that illuminated the energon seeping out about it. Swearing to himself, Ratchet switched to a more targeted scan, growling at the readings that came back.

 _Damn the luck,_ he cursed. Just getting to that energon line was going to be a task, and a major line like that... fail-safes could only do so much, and it was a trunk injury, not a limb. He couldn't easily replace the damaged line. Systemic pressure was spiking erratically, and Amtek's power production was already plummeting as his body tried to seal off the breach at the injector site. So much for leaving Amtek hooked up to Quickstart, Ratchet thought. He couldn't handle the power drop. He briefly considered hooking up himself, but rejected the idea – he needed to be able to get to that core support unit, or all the power in the world wasn't going to save Quickstart.

"Don't move," he ordered, pressing the other back against a life-rack that leaned askew against the wall, and he glanced over his shoulder. The MPs were still clustered about the remains of the door, as their target edged further back into the depths of the ward. Ratchet scanned Quickstart, scanned Amtek, and then stared again towards that cabinet – the cabinet towards the end of the ward.

Bullets sang overhead, coming from both ends of the ward, but at least there were no more missiles. And while it was hard to judge with ordinance flying about indiscriminately, a tank made for war could surely have caused more damage if he'd a mind to, except that he'd taken a hit that'd scrambled his neural system. If he were on canned defense protocols, they'd likely been damaged, too...

"And fire control usually degrades with injury anyway," he said, more to convince himself than anything else.

"Ratchet?" Amtek asked, sounding vaguely alarmed.

"You'd better hope I'm right," Ratchet replied, forming his taser, and then added over his shoulder, "But if I'm not, save yourself – disconnect, but _do not_ pull that shrapnel without a medic _._ "

With that, ignoring Amtek's inarticulate protest, and without allowing himself a second thought, he lit his own medical call-sign off as bright as he could and made a dash for it. He heard curses from behind, felt somebody's targeting scan slide over his armor, and he threw himself to one side, struggling to hold his broadcast against the impulse to go as signal-silent as he could in a futile attempt to pass under the radar unnoticed. He rolled and came up scrabbling for traction as he dove for that cabinet, aware on some level of the ring and clatter of bullets.

Something hot slammed into his back and side, made him stagger. Fear gave him the wings then that his design never had – he launched himself forward, hit the deck and skidded 'til he collided with the cabinet, then lay there stunned for a minute by the impact, left arm heavy with numbness. _Slaggit!_

Something dark blocked the stars that shone down through the roof. The tank! _Please let him be on canned protocols!_

Ratchet lay absolutely still. The gun leveled at him was live, but the 'bot hadn't shot him yet – hopefully because he was a medic who wasn't moving and automatic protocols marked him a lower threat profile than the 'bots lobbing bullets at them. But perhaps not. Recognition hit Ratchet like the very wall itself, and with it, the sense of Amtek's cut off warnings.

" _Barrage_?"

The heating elements in the gun barrel glowed redly, so he saw that arm dip slightly – perhaps a shred of memory had broken through the damage. For his part, Ratchet stared a split second, then heat flooded through him like a sunstorm. The next instant, Barrage staggered back, sparking badly at the knee joint. Blistering heat streaked just over Ratchet's shoulder, as Ratchet swept Barrage's bad leg out from under him, then scrambled forward.

He fell on the sergeant, throwing himself over one arm, using his weight to hold it down. The other he pinned briefly with the muzzle of his own gun and fired, disabling weaponry in an instant, before going straight for interface ports. Barrage snarled, but he wasn't with special ops: but a moment later, he went limp all at once, leaving Ratchet lying half atop him, venting hard, confused by the very clarity of the one undeniable fact:

 _I shot him._

The sense of unreality opened like a vast distance. He registered the sound of concerned voices, of orders and commands, and a certain strange silence – the shooting, he realized, had stopped. But he couldn't seem to move.

It was the priority query from Damage Control Central that finally got his attention, and with a shake to rattle his vents, he sent in a medical emergency override of their inquiry and shut that channel down. The MPs were pinging his comm; he posted a brusque "Standby" broadcast. Then he carefully sat up, wincing at the line of fire that flared, then faded, along his back and shoulder, and scanned Barrage for damage – a lot of chipping and warping to armor and some internal damage from heat and gunfire, but the only truly damaging hits, other than the one that'd blown his memory, were the disabling shots to leg and arm.

Ratchet shuttered his optics a moment, then posted Barrage to the casualty list, and tagged him a three with a security risk warning. He levered himself off the floor then and hit the touch-panel on the cabinet door. There was, indeed, a portable core support unit within. Relief flooded through him, and he yanked it out, grunted and hissed through his vents when his left arm failed to respond and he nearly dropped the PCSU.

Footsteps rang all about him as a group of MPs hurriedly surrounded him. "What the frag were you think–" their leader began, but stopped rather comically when Ratchet, with a growl, shoved the equipment into his arms.

"Give me a hand," he ordered. Surprise showed in the flickering of lights and looks that went among them, but Ratchet merely flared his tones impatiently. "I said give me a hand, or we're losing a medic right now!"

That, at least, galvanized the commander into action. He followed Ratchet, who managed to hobble with some speed back down the aisle, face set against the spreading numbness and the flashes of worse, to where Quickstart lay. Amtek, slouching heavily beside him, gave a dull little whine of inquiry – _What's happening?_

"Just hold steady another minute," Ratchet told him. Pulling a transfer cable from his own ventral cache, Ratchet pointed to the floor and ordered his dragooned assistant: "Set it down there."

Without waiting to see whether his command was obeyed, he awkwardly lowered himself to the ground and quickly plugged into one of the emergency back-up power ports alongside Quickstart's spark chamber. Dizziness swept over him, as his own system struggled to adjust to the sudden increase in power demand. But:

"Pull Amtek's line, but _not_ the shard, and get him clear of here – I've got Quickstart covered," he told the MP, and grimaced at the distortion in his voice. The MP, at least, didn't question him over that, just reached and disconnected Amtek, motioning for two of his squad to move him. Ratchet gave an approving hum, then continued: "I want you to have your squad check every 'bot in this ward. If anyone is tagged for memory or fire control damage, make sure he has a restraint in. If he doesn't or you can't tell, then manually sever weaponry control from firing mechanisms. We'll deal with the damage later."

The MP vented, but nodded at his remaining two 'bots, who hurried to obey. "What else?"

"Help the DC techs start clearing berths and aisles," Ratchet replied, swearing as he bent over Quickstart, wondering if he dared try to start disconnecting peripheral systems. "Clear the berths first, so we have some idea of our capacity here. Then clear DCC to send another unit down here, and see what you can do to convince Logistics we need more support. We've just become primary triage."

"And what about him?" He gestured to Quickstart.

"Not your work," Ratchet replied, even as he opened a comm line. _Flashflare, I need some help here._

 _I've got three 'bots with blown heat regulators and an unstable power grid. Can it wait?_ Flashflare demanded.

 _Not if you want Quickstart to live,_ he replied. _Leave the grid problem to DCC, and give your 'bots a shot of coolant straight into their energon lines to make them run slower and colder. They'll hold long enough. I can't treat him one-handed with hand-helds!_

There was a pause, then: _I'm on my way._

"You know, you could've ended up like this," the MP said just then, nodding curtly at Quickstart. "What the frag were you doing, Doctor?"

" _Your_ job, apparently," was Ratchet's undiplomatic reply, even as something sparked and shorted unexpectedly. He felt it in the power flux on that life-line to Quickstart, in the electrical shock when he reached automatically to try and patch the core-side system. "Slaggit!"

Just then, Flashflare appeared. He scanned the area, found Ratchet, and hurried over, flicking on his floodlights. "Move," he snapped at the MP, who apparently took that as dismissal and made off without another word to oversee his techs. "Primus!" Flashflare muttered as he scanned the mess, then reached immediately for the core support unit.

Relieved of responsibility and helpless to assist further, Ratchet simply sat and watched, leaning against the wall, cycling heat through his vents and wincing whenever the power draw made damaged circuitry spark along his injured left side. He could feel numbness spreading outward as his body tried to isolate the damage and spare him the pain so long as he didn't move. But a hit to the core was harder to handle even if you were built to tolerate that sort of abuse – which he was not, and he revved softly, achingly.

At least those rounds hadn't been explosive frangibles, he thought, grateful for small mercies. Frangibles would've had enough force to punch straight through his support structure and puncture his own spark chamber, especially at such close range. Even if they hadn't, they would've mucked up his innards in any case – pulverized circuitry and perforated structural metal, weakening it. It was like inflicting a crush wound from the inside out, if you got enough of those into a 'bot.

Even without them, he'd suffered some ricochet damage – he could feel it in the gritty sensation when he tried shifting positions, and his self-scan confirmed it – but he was holding. He could hold – just leave the bullets in to act as partial support, run cabling around the damage so he could move his arm, and another patch-line from his core neural column to his leg, and he'd be serviceable.

Too bad he couldn't say the same for Barrage. The rounds he'd fired into him wouldn't need to be removed only because at point blank range, they would have torn straight through him and gone out the back. And while he hadn't damaged anything vital, Barrage probably would have to have that knee joint and associated transformation nodes entirely rebuilt. As for the arm, it was probably going to be faster to simply detach it at the shoulder and substitute a new one than rebuild the damaged one. Reconstructing weaponry systems so that they didn't jam when needed was always difficult, after all...

"Do I want to know how you wound up on the wrong end of a gun?"Flashflare chose that moment to ask.

Ratchet shuttered his optics. "Probably not," he answered tiredly. Flashflare grunted, scanning him quickly and ignoring his wincing. Then:

"I'm reading a need for bypass wiring to your arm and leg. What's your limit on the pain index?"

"Higher than what I'll be feeling." And when Flashflare only shot him a look, he insisted, "I can handle it."

His brother, after a moment, nodded, since there really wasn't any choice. "Standard Dag-series cabling?"

"That'll work," Ratchet murmured.

"Good, because that's all we've got."

The two of them fell silent, then, as Flashflare cut through primary structure to isolate core systems. He worked at a furious pace, for which Ratchet was grateful, because Quickstart's power draw wasn't getting any lighter, and he could feel his own core temperature rising as his body struggled to meet the power demands of two shells, neither of them healthy. His own model had good insulation and a very efficient system of heat exchange and reconversion, so he wasn't in imminent danger of blowing anything, but he was going to crash sooner, and especially since he would be bleeding power from damaged circuitry and a severed power line until repairs could be effected, whenever that might be...

"Before you called, Logistics and Damage Control Central were both screaming down my line about you," Flashflare informed him absently, though Ratchet could hear the stress in his undertones. "I have a feeling you're headed to another chat with Flicksaw about protocol."

Ratchet vented. "DCC has no reason to comm me unless they can't reach you." He eyed Flashflare, who simply shrugged, admitting nothing. Ratchet gave a knowing, sarcastic flare of bass tones at that. "Right. And if they can't reach me, they have six techs assigned to these wards, one of whom is down but not unconscious. They don't need my report. Logistics – "

" – wants to strip you down for spares," Flashflare interjected.

"Did we at least get the parts?" he demanded, refusing to waste his energy on a useless argument.

"No." Ratchet gave a frustrated whine of his engine. Flashflare, with a final twist, finished his work and glanced up at him. "Not all of them," he relented. "But some of them. Given the means, I hate to say it, but good work." He gestured towards Ratchet's line. "Disconnect – let's see if your latest gamble paid off."

With a grunt, Ratchet did so, and drew the cable back in. The support unit beeped softly, but its alert light remained steady – Quickstart might be borderline stable, but he was holding on support. Both of them vented in relief, Ratchet slouching wearily. Flashflare hummed softly, then he gestured for Ratchet to turn around. "Let's get those bypasses wired."

"Just anchor the cabling in my spinal column – I can finish the rest myself," Ratchet replied, as he straightened carefully so he could turn his back to Flashflare.

"As soon as you do," Flashflare replied, "I'm handing you ward six, and I'll take ward five. I've already posted the change to Flicksaw's board."

"He didn't contest it?"

"No time, and you're already down here – path of least resistance," Flashflare replied, then draped a cable over Ratchet's shoulder. Ratchet mechanically threaded it through armor and substructure, digging into his shoulder a bit to find the relevant neural node. His engine gave a little whine as he found it, and feeling came flooding back down his arm in an unpleasant rush of heat and tingle.

"Have you got that other line in yet?" he asked, as he reformed the taser into his left hand.

"Nearly. Here," Flashflare handed him the other end, then rose. "Can you manage?"

"Give me a minute or two," Ratchet replied. Then: "Flashflare," he called, when the other turned to go survey the damage to his new ward. His brother glanced back, lights flashing inquiringly. Ratchet hesitated just a moment, then said: "Barrage was the shooter."

" _Barrage_?" Flashflare gave an off-key whine. "I suppose we're lucky the place is still standing at all!"

"His memory may or may not be completely compromised, and he's going to need reconstruction on an arm and leg. Just make sure he's all right," Ratchet said, voice low and urgent. Flashflare gave him a queer look.

"We're running triage," he said fatalistically, but then promised: "I'll keep you posted."


	8. Confessor Machinae

As soon as he had gotten the bypass wired, and done a quick test of his range of motion, Ratchet had limped straight back to ward six with his toolkit to deal with the blown heat regulators and every 'bot else in line. At least DCC sent more techs down: two full teams, in fact, to help with triage and to begin dealing with the structural damage to the ward. Ratchet growlingly worked around them, though he was in fact pleasantly surprised to discover that one of them was a senior grade engineering tech whose specialization in systemic design meant he could actually be trusted with even secondary level salvage work. Even better, he'd recognized the need himself.

"Looks like you've got less support than you need, and we've got a lot of bodies, unfortunately. You got any salvage priorities?" the 'bot, whose prominent cranial signal strobes marked him as built for the airless orbitals or else for the deep underground power and mining shafts, had pulled him aside to ask.

"I've got a list of them. You're sure you can do this?" Ratchet had demanded.

"I've worked a med bay before when our squad medic was short-handed, which was always," had been the reply, and he'd flicked a panel on his wrist open, revealing access ports. Ratchet had nodded. It was a quick transfer, then Ratchet disconnected.

"What's your name and comm code?" he'd asked.

"Wheeljack," the other had answered, and pinged Ratchet's comm himself, leaving his own code with its tell-tale prefixes. The medic gave a soft whine of surprise.

"You're with Optronix's company?"

"Since day one. Anyhow, I'm going to take that corner and make it my space; there are one or two others on my team I know can help with this, so I'll collect them. You need something, shout."

Wheeljack had been as good as his word and his rating, which had earned him Ratchet's undying gratitude as the long line of triage patients and repair stretched out with no apparent end in sight. He wasn't sure when hostilities officially ceased – he had shut down his link to the tac-net as a useless distraction – but nevertheless, he marked the aftermath of battle by the sudden, massive influx of walking wounded. Injured, but not seriously enough to prevent them from continuing to fight, command had finally determined that they could afford to send them back for repairs.

Preoccupied as he was with patients and with managing his little team of salvage assistants, time had continued its jagged passage without him marking so much as an hour of it. But at a certain point, he paused in his work and realized that he had no new admissions. And with a dull sense of shock, he realized, too, that it was the day after the day after tomorrow: he'd worked straight through without a stop or a second thought or anything resembling recharge.

At least he had a new set of assistants: all air lift medical techs had been freed up with the end of the battle, and after a shift recharging and getting patched and retanked themselves were rotating in to help the surgeons on the triage wards.

"Where do you need us?" Skypax asked him, a pair of his brethren at his not inconsiderable back.

"Walk the wards – do rounds and second pass repairs on anyone tagged a priority three," Ratchet replied. "I'm going to check our priority twos and make sure they're holding."

"What about salvage?" one of the others asked.

"Taken care of, though in a couple of hours, you can take over that duty – tell Wheeljack and his crew I said so. Mean time, get on the ward – call me if any of the threes start to crash."

It took him almost three hours to work his way through the priority two list on his ward, during which time, he took six calls from his assistants, to say nothing of dealing with a couple of serious cases himself who'd needed quick attention before their condition could worsen. By the time he finally blue-lit the last name on his list, low spirits had joined dwindling energy. The ragged, broken signatures of every 'bot on the ward had soaked into the very air of the place, literally radiating agony despite unconsciousness, and Ratchet felt as if he were in a windstorm – every way he turned, hurt washed over him like a wave of hot needles that made him twitch with the need to soothe them, or at least quiet them. But there was nothing more he could do – not right now, and of a sudden, he could not get off the ward fast enough.

"Ratchet to Flashflare," he said into his comm, once he'd checked the roster to see who had post-battle ward monitor duty. There was a slight pause, then:

"Ward monitor here, go ahead," his brother's voice came through his speakers.

"Ward six is clear: all patients are stabilized," he reported.

"Noted." There was a pause, then: "Listen, Ratchet, I know you're working injured, but I need you to take Quickstart's rotation on scrap analysis and repair."

"How is he?" Ratchet asked, tiredly.

"Not well." There was a brief pause, then: "I'm sorry, Ratchet, but – "

"He didn't make it." Ratchet's tones were flat as they were certain, and his engine gave a low whine when Flashflare said only:

"No, he didn't." Another pause, then: "Are you all right?"

Ratchet vented, feeling heat trickle slowly out. "I'm fine," he lied. "It happens." He gave himself a brief shake, winced at the feel of shards grating internally, then said: "I'll report for scrap analysis – just give me five minutes to pull a team together."

"Thank you. I'll post you to Flicksaw's staff board," Flashflare replied. "Just hold steady. We're going to short-shift the rotations: Darklight will replace you in two hours."

"Right. I mean 'copy.' Whatever," Ratchet vented, abandoning all pretense of proper comm protocol, as he pressed hard over that troublesome forearm tensor that of a sudden blazed with white heat. He heard Flashflare give a weary rumble – pallid, tired amusement.

"Two hours," the other promised, and then cut the line.

~0~

Ratchet's recruited scrap team consisted of one of the air lift med techs and one of Wheeljack's more promising DC techs, which had the virtue of at least staggering their progress towards useless exhaustion. Nevertheless, by the time Darklight and a pair of medical field techs appeared to replace Ratchet and his team, the DC tech was swearing every other word, the field tech was running at half power, and Ratchet was so far past exhausted he was suffering the misery of sensory 'gravitic burn.' Everything – even air – seemed to press too dense and hot and close, and to swirl and swell with alarming disproportion with every movement. He went carefully, therefore, struggling with the cool anaesthesia of vision against the painful exaggeration of teeking, and made sure the field tech double checked his work to avoid stupid mistakes.

"You're relieved," Darklight told him. "Get some rest."Ratchet merely grunted softly.

"You heard him," he told his techs. "We've got two hours before we're back on the wards, so don't waste them."

"Aye, sir," they murmured. Ratchet stood a moment, contemplating just how tired he felt, then flashed Darklight a farewell and headed out. Glancing down the hall, he caught sight of his techs making for the medics' recharge berths. He likely ought to follow suit, but after a moment, feeling himself too unsettled yet to fathom resting despite his exhaustion, he turned and headed back towards the ward, pulling up a list of berths and occupants, searching until he found his patient.

Barrage wasn't conscious, which was fortunate – Ratchet had no desire to test his memory at the moment. He did, however, check the readout on the berth's side-wall projector, and found it much as he'd expected: no irreparable physical damage, though he might suffer some irretrievable memory loss. It was too early to tell.

Ratchet's engine gave a little whine, as armor plating pulled in tightly, and he shut down vision for a moment. The whole room felt like fragging acid. He felt gritty inside – probably from the amount of dust and debris that'd gotten inside his armor from the wall and ward five and ballistic damage. Really, he had no business on a ward, unless to get his own injuries tended to, which he really ought to do.

Instead, he turned and headed for the commons.

The commons, unsurprisingly, were filled with base personnel intent on boosting energy levels before heading back to their tasks. Ratchet cringed to teek them all, but he fixed his sight on his goal and resolutely marched into the thick of things to collect a pair of medic's ration packs. Then stepping carefully and striving to ignore the way the room and tables and 'bots seemed to swell and waver to overstimulated sensors, he made straight for an out of the way table where he was unlikely to be bothered.

Once he'd claimed his place, he sat there for a few moments, contemplating the tabletop. Then with a cycle of his vents, he logged into the medical hub. It was filled with post-op chatter, but he passed by that and went directly for personnel records, searching Quickstart's. Not that he couldn't guess how it must have gone, but...

"So, doc, mind if I sit?" asked a too-familiar voice just then.

Ratchet flinched – violently. The data on the sidebar of his HUD vanished almost instantly – exhausted as he was, his concentration was shot, which did not make him any better disposed toward the special ops tech who backed a dramatic pace and held up his hands placatingly. "Whoa, little frightenin' there, Ratchet! Look like that, a 'bot might think you were set to kill someone."

Ratchet glared at him, but did not dignify that little dig of a joke with any more answer than that. "Will you turn those dampeners off?" he demanded instead. "You're standing right in front of me!"

"Sure thing," Jazz replied, as his signature flashed like magnesium across Ratchet's much abused sensors, making him hiss softly. Then, gesturing to the empty side of the table, he asked: "What about it, doc? There a seat free here?"

With a low growl of his engine, Ratchet replied caustically, "Of course there is – I just sit in the corner by myself because I'm hoping for company! Maybe a gun in my face just for the fun of it." He paused a moment, waiting for the comeback. The special ops tech's lengthy string of disciplinary citations for back talk practically guaranteed one. But Jazz didn't say anything, and Ratchet realized, as the seconds ticked by, that he was still standing there, apparently waiting for an invitation. The medic shook his head, sharply.

"Don't play with me!" he warned, with a rather impressive harmonic vibralto, and if something of distress bled into his bass tones, he didn't bother to censor it.

"Ain't playin'," Jazz assured him, and seemed actually sincere. Surprised and still rather suspicious, Ratchet slouched down a bit in his seat, the better to stare up at the other.

"Why?" he asked at length.

"'Cause there's two kinds of tables in the world, doc, but they got one thing between 'em," Jazz replied, and paused. Ratchet, after a moment, vented, but he asked the required question:

"And what might that be?"

"They don't stand having games played across 'em. Trust me on that one, I've been at both and sat all sides," came the enigmatic response. Then: "So – you want company or not?"

 _No,_ Ratchet thought, feeling heat and hurt throb through him. He did not want company; he especially did not want to deal with Jazz when his mind felt rather like a heat sink. The heat sink perhaps was why, instead of telling Jazz off, he gestured at the space across the way and said, "Have a seat."

The special ops tech blinkered his thanks, then stepped forward onto the scan-pad, was scanned, and then the back half of a line of superdense metal laid into the floor shot up. It formed itself into a seat to conform to his model, supporting him as he sank down onto it.

"You look like one of your patients," Jazz said conversationally, and Ratchet felt the other's scan crawl over him, fixing swiftly on the bullet wounds. He blenched, and Jazz instantly ceased. "Friendly fire?"

Ratchet gave the other a long stare, trying to decide whether that meant more than it said, before saying pointedly, "I'm fine, thanks for asking."

"What's the situation in there?" the other asked, more seriously this time as he nodded back over his shoulder in the direction of the med bay.

"We're full up," Ratchet said after a moment spent collecting himself, and then reached for one of the energon rations. Breaking the seal, he continued, "The ERB back in Iacon is probably at capacity, too. From what I've heard reported, we took some forty percent of the med-evacs from Nova Cronum, and the majority of the wounded from Praxus. Some of the code ones and twos went to Iacon towards the end, but the military is attempting to tend to its own, since Nova Cronum's civilians need so much care." He paused briefly, then added: "We're also down one surgeon on the wards."

Jazz's engine crooned softly. "Heard about Quickstart – ain't no way to go, if you gotta go," he declared, and shook his head. Then eying Ratchet, he queried: "You okay, doc?"

Nevertheless, despite the apparently genuine concern, Ratchet's response was quick, short, and quelling: "You needn't worry about me." And he pressed on swiftly: "What about our position? We couldn't have taken all the wounded from Nova Cronum, not even with Iacon opening its bays. They must have one ERB operational still – at least, they did two days ago..."

Ratchet trailed off, and looked a question at Jazz. The special ops tech gave a low growl of his engine, but accepted the change of subject without comment. "Nova Cronum's still painted our colors, but it's a faded sort of red. That bout of nastiness in Praxus was cover – the 'Cons slipped a wing of jets out of Praxan airspace while they had us pinned down and preoccupied. Lightning strike – couldn't hold what they hit, but they hit good and hard." Jazz shook his head, undertones flaring in a discordant minor key, like an auditory grimace. "Took down the comm cluster, tore up the roads and knocked out two of the main generator complexes. Power grid's all kinds of messed up. ERB took a hit, too, but it wasn't direct, and they're still receivin' patients from what I hear."

Ratchet stared at him a moment, then frowned, confused. "So Nova Cronum was the feint, then?"

Jazz cocked his head. "' _The_ feint'?" he repeated, apparently just as confused as Ratchet for once. "What was the other option?"

"Just something Flashflare said," Ratchet explained tiredly. "When the call from Nova Cronum came in, he wondered whether Praxus might be a feint, whether the Decepticons might've always been aiming for Nova Cronum. But it doesn't sound like it was..." He trailed off as Jazz chuckled softly. "What?" he demanded, an edge creeping back into his voice.

"Don't worry, doc – comes to Flashflare, I got respect," Jazz assured him, still sounding amused. "It's true, as a rule, I ain't much for medics, but Flashflare's all right – good 'bot, good medic, helped patch me up after my little 'incident.'" The special ops tech waggled a pair of fingers, making the brief, low-level pulse of their electromagnets "ripple" coyly. "But if you ever need a quick couple of credits or someone to pull the dead shift for you, go a few rounds of Strategix with him, 'cause you can't lose. Outside matters medical, he's got all the strategic sense of a light post."

He shook his head again, then tipped his chair back a bit so he could draw a leg up onto the seat edge. Clasping his hands about his knee, he explained: "Praxus was never a feint. The 'Cons went for Praxus because it's our biggest production center for flyers. All our 'bots topside can work in low gravity or no gravity, but not a lot of 'em are transatmospheric, an' if you put 'em in atmosphere, they can't fly any more than you or I. Since the war started, Optronix has had his hands full dealing with Decepticon flyers – who generally _are_ transatmospheric jets, bein' military models – stationed further out or from other stations they took over. Unless we get Praxus back or expand production elsewhere and fast, we can't keep up. We can't keep up, we can't hold the sky, an' speakin' tactically, that's when things get _real_ fun here on the ground."

The special ops tech grinned crookedly at him. "By comparison, Nova Cronum's more symbol than substance, but that don't mean it ain't worth the risk of getting shot down by SELDoSD."

"'SELDoSD'?"

"Sky-eye look-down-shoot-down systems," Jazz spelled it out. "They're anti-aircraft gun mounts on the earthside of stations – pretty specialized, good at picking up stealthed targets. They're part of what's helped us hold onto topside and our bit of earth as long as we have."

"So what happened four days ago, then?" Ratchet demanded.

"Four days ago was a month since the 'Cons attacked Praxus and got their claws in it." And when Ratchet just stared at him, he elaborated: "Well, they ain't had any luck repairing that flyer production facility – got pretty badly damaged by some high-density explosives when our 'bots got pushed back to the northeastern half of the city. An' the Praxus comm cluster's still down, an' they've been coolin' their jets between cute little get-nothing skirmishes for weeks."

Jazz spread his hands briefly, then laced his fingers together against the electromagnets that flared to life, repulsing each other. Ratchet, who'd never been overly fond even on a good day of the way same-pole magnets teeked in proximity, twitched a bit across the table, as Jazz finished: "Time on their hands like that, it's not too surprising that somebot's managed to get a half dozen high-powered EW drones up and running – sent a couple of 'em to broadcast blinders at SELDoSD, seeded their flight wedge with the rest. Played merry hell with tracking."

There was a lengthy silence, during which Ratchet struggled to process what he'd been told. "You're saying they did it because they were frustrated?" he finally said, unable to keep his horror or his incomprehension out of his voice. Or his disgust, of which there was plenty.

A shrug. "More or less. Likely they want to make sure we know they're there, an' that we ain't clipped their wings. See, morale's got two sides in a war zone," Jazz said, trilling his secondary tones a bit when Ratchet grimaced. "Fun, no?"

"Primus," Ratchet muttered.

"In-forms us all, but that don't help _us_ win the war _,"_ Jazz quipped, and when Ratchet hissed through his vents, asked: "Still wanna be here, doc?"

Vents cycled decisively then, and Ratchet shook his head. "What did I tell you?" he growled warningly.

"Still ain't playin'," Jazz answered, and lifted his chin slightly. "Just being _direct_."

The light emphasis on that last word was unmistakable, and Ratchet's engine gave a low rumble in response. "Your timing," he said flatly, "is appalling."

"Depends on your answer," Jazz countered, idly tracing magnetized circles on the table with one claw.

Ratchet gave a queer little whine of his engine, staring at Jazz with some suspicion. "Why the interest in my answer? What's your stake, Jazz?"

"What makes you think I've got one?"

"The remarkable consistency of rumor and hearsay with your psych file," Ratchet shot back. "Or because you're not playing – pick your motive, I don't care which, but answer the fragging question or I'm leaving."

"Hm." Jazz hummed and scanned damaged plating again, this time simply canting an optical ridge when Ratchet flinched and growled. "Hurts, don't it?" he observed.

Ratchet shook his head. "Leaving it is," he said, and made to rise.

Or he would've. He got as far as "Leaving – " before Jazz moved neatly to intercept, flowing out of his chair to lay a hand on Ratchet's shoulder – right over the lodging point of Barrage's bullets. He flicked his electromagnets on. Ratchet gave a strangled little trill as debris and one or two of the bullets, in response to that low-level field, shifted to the feeling of shooting pain.

"Stay awhile, doc," Jazz said pleasantly, though that steely undertone was back, as he pretended to press Ratchet back into his seat, before reseating himself. "You're still pretty far underpower, you know."

Incensed, Ratchet stared at him in shock. "What under the double moons – ?" he hissed, but was cut off.

"Like you said – I ain't playin'. And like I said, I've sat all sides of this table, so I know: ain't one of 'em that's pretty." Jazz shrugged.

Ratchet spluttered. "Are you _threatening_ me?"

"No."

"Then what the frag...?"

"We both want answers, doc. I'm not gonna get mine if you walk off. An' you won't get yours either if you leave. And you know you'd hate it if you left, 'cause then you'd be thinkin' about this all day."

"What makes you imagine I'd waste a single slagging minute remembering this?" Ratchet demanded, scathingly.

"'Cause I was all set to go my way last time – leave you to yourself. You were the one who couldn't take that. Face it," Jazz said, tones all too reasonable, "if you'd walked out just now, it wouldn't matter how far you went, you wouldn't ever leave the table. I'm just lettin' you feel it, that's all. So," he invited and gestured to the chair, "sit and talk – convince me you're _not_ wantin' a little bit of burn right now, 'cause you know how this is gonna look on the outside."

"How _what_ is going to look to which outside?"

"C'mon, doc," Jazz adopted a chiding tone. "Everybody knows the back-line ERB ain't supposed to be battlefield medicine – that's how you got into this gig, by pushin' that line with Flicksaw. An' he an' the board bought it. Barrage, though," he vented, and shook his head in mock regret, "he never was in on the deal an' he don't much care about _oughts_." Laying his hands flat on the table, Jazz leaned forward to say, with disturbing relish: "How many casualties you got comin' out of that mess? How many fatalities? Thirty? Forty? Fragger _killed_ one of your brothers, an' not cleanly – slagged him good and hard first."

The special ops tech paused a moment, before continuing with sudden sharpness. "You were the medic on deck. Way I hear it, you took a slagging huge chance to try an' save Quickstart when he was already dyin' – could've easily got yourself fragged. You got luckier than anybody's got a right to, but you've still got the bullets in your bolts. It's been almost five days since your last off-shift. You're gonna be back on shift in less than two hours, and I'm thinking you won't find time between now and then to get those fraggers pulled. I know you're not one to cross purposes, but care to speculate how your neuropsych file's gonna read after this?"

Ratchet shuttered his optics, venting long and low so that vents barely lifted. Finally: "I am notsuicidal," he stated, in a tone that would permit no disagreement. "Nor am I guilt-ridden – I know my limits. I've lost patients before."

"Not like this you haven't," Jazz countered. "And not bein' suicidal ain't the same as not punishin' yourself."

"I'm _not_ – look, we couldn't get supplies out of Logistics in the middle of a battle, and that was two days ago," Ratchet snapped, every tone sharp with impatience. "I'm functional – I'm below a priority four, all right?"

"Ah, ah – don't be modest, doc," Jazz admonished, eyes brightening. "You went up against a _tank_ , and came out a priority four – which is a win by anyone's standards. And most wards couldn't pull what they needed out of Logistics 'cause it was going front-line and to surgery, but _you_ did. Nice work, by the way, usin' those couple of luckless fraggers. Like the way you play!"

"I don't _play_ on the job!"

"If you say so," Jazz replied easily, waving a dismissive hand as he leaned back in his seat, dangling one arm over the back. "Fun diversions aside, though – " blue eyes brightened further at Ratchet's exasperated flare of vents " – on the matter of your medical non-priority, if you asked, somebody'd at least solder a plug in and clip the cords down, 'cause bypass cabling's just askin' to be pulled. You haven't asked, though.

"And you're still sittin' here after I've put the burn on you not once, but twice," he said, eying Ratchet speculatively, and Ratchet felt every coil in him clench. "Means either you're scared to move, or you don't really mind the pain. You don't scare that easily – I know it – which leaves option number two, which, you gotta admit, is all kinds of interesting."

"Only to you," Ratchet shot back.

"That's 'cause I'm what you'd call a deviation, an' not the standard one, either. But back to you an' your psych file," Jazz replied, without missing a beat. "You know what I'm gettin' at, doc, an' it ain't the simple fact that you lost some 'bots today, not even that you lost Quickstart. That's not why we're at this table." He paused. "You gonna make me say it, or are you gonna own up to the obvious?"

A brief, intense silence followed. Then:

"You're a real mismake, Jazz," Ratchet said quietly.

"Never claimed otherwise," the special ops tech replied, matching him tone for tone.

"What happened in ward five is public record. How I feel about it – that's between me and the board. I don't owe you an accounting."

"No, you don't," the other admitted. "But I'm offerin' to let you, nonetheless."

Ratchet gave an amazed chuff of air through his vents, and shook his head. "Is that supposed to be funny?" he demanded, honestly baffled.

"Not really, though a good joke's never a loss," Jazz answered.

"Yes, especially when the laugh is on someone else, I imagine," Ratchet said acidly. Jazz turned a palm up, flickered his lights, acknowledging the hit. The medic shook his head. "You're a piece of work!"

"Can't deny it. But I'm still offerin' to take your account."

Another silence settled between them. Jazz just sat there, tracing slow infinities on the tabletop, seemingly quite absorbed in this activity. Despite exhaustion, however, Ratchet was not fooled, and after awhile, demanded, in terse, low tones: "What makes you believe you're qualified to be _anyone'_ s confidant, let alone mine?"

The silver 'bot cocked his head, as if considering his quarry, before hazarding, "I can keep a secret?"

Ratchet gave a disdainful flare of bass tones. "I don't trust you worth a damn, Jazz."

"Don't expect that you do," the other replied, without fuss, "but lemme ask you this: who _would_ qualify? Flashflare?"

"He comes to mind." The special ops tech gave a soft croon and rumble.

"Sure he does. He'll probably ask quietly, maybe get a little upset with you for not talkin' sooner, just 'cause he'll be a _lot_ more upset with you for goin' up against Barrage like you did, but he'll be understanding. He won't push you, 'cause he'll think you need the space to 'come to terms'," Jazz said, pulsing his magnets, one after the other, to set off the phrase. Then, in an apparently random change of topic: "He got any theories about you and that pain problem you got goin'? You know, the one where you can't seem to get your tool transformations down, save the one you don't want?"

Ratchet frowned. "Not that it's your concern, but it's an adaptation issue – it'll pass with practice."

"And you believe that? Well, of course you do – and of course he does. Anyhow, Flashflare's perceptive – astute, even. And he's pretty good at listening. But he ain't gonna make you talk," Jazz said, with certainty.

Ratchet canted an optical ridge. "Most people would say that's a virtue."

"Most people would, yeah. But that ain't you or me." The special ops tech lifted his chin slightly, regarding Ratchet a moment. "Look, doc, talk to your brothers – talk to Flashflare, talk to Flicksaw, let the monotone neuropsychs crawl into your head. Do all that," he urged. "You should. You're gonna have to. But when you're done with that, an' you're set to blow a breaker over gettin' treated like broken parts, call me."

Ratchet stared at the other, nonplussed. "Call you?" he repeated.

"Sure."

"And the reason you think I would do this would be…?"

"'Cause I ain't interested in fixing you." And in the face of a rather intent stare, he shrugged. "You wanna fight your war – the one that nobody else is fightin' except for you – I got no problem with that. But you gotta know your enemy, an' I'm thinkin' that that's where you're gonna fall down unless you figure it out and fast."

Jazz tilted his head then, as if checking his message queue. "I gotta go," he announced, then pinged Ratchet's comm, leaving his own code. "Talk to you later."

With that, he unfolded from his seat, rapped the table top once in farewell, then slipped away.

Ratchet watched him go, and after a few moments, he checked his chronometer: one hour 'til he was back on shift. _Primus_ , he thought, groaning inwardly. Quickly injecting the rest of the energon, he rose, cleaned up his space, and then paused a moment, hesitating between the lure of something like rest and the ward. _It's one hour_ , insisted the merciless voice of efficiency, or perhaps evasion. With an exhausted cycle of vents, Ratchet headed back for the ward.

 _Fragging tables!_


	9. Acclimation

Three more days slid by. Ratchet finally got a half shift off on the second day, and by the third, a respectable web of cabling and conduits was beginning to take form between wards five and six as the DC techs hit their stride. He lost Wheeljack and his team to them then, but he did not miss them as he would have earlier: for with their medical field techs back from the front lines, and no additional casualties, the frantic pace became more benign. Ratchet didn't have to watch hourly over every patient ward six berthed; he didn't have to make every decision on an overcrowded ward, and since he wasn't on surgical rotation yet, all he had to do was keep his 'bots stable until the surgeons could pry enough parts loose to handle them. He even had time finally to get patched – being a medic did have its perks when it came to queuing for repair work.

If only he hadn't the "Barrage incident" to deal with, too, it might have been as close to normal as he'd known since the invasion of Praxus. Ratchet had duly submitted his after-action report to Flicksaw, to which he had appended the events in ward five, all of it composed with a maximum of efficiency and neutrality. The CMO had logged it received, and added that they would speak later about ward five, Flicksaw having still more than enough to preoccupy him. But rumor, free from such constraints, moved far more quickly than the CMO.

Rather than confront him directly, though, it mostly hovered in the background. The more cognizant of his patients were as polite as discomfort, grief, and weariness with being injured allowed, but not every awkward silence could be blamed upon such, and certainly none of the not-quite-covert-enough scans or quiet berthside conversations broken off upon his approach. The messages from the sergeancy in his queue had a different tone, too, from the last "incident."

 _Well done,_ read one, _but don't let it be luck._

Or again: _Good impulse, bad decision – keep it simple 'til you know what you're doing, and stay out of the way of the MPs_.

 _Next time, take the head shot if you get it,_ read a third; _Nobody worth his marks wants that kind of mayhem on his conscience or his record._

That one stayed with him like a bad day.

"How badly is this bothering you?" Flashflare asked him at one point, as the two of them sat and did some long overdue tending to themselves. Having finally caught up on just enough rest not to be staggering about on-shift, they sat in the surgeons' quarters, checking over tools and repairing damage, getting the recalcitrant gritty fluid stains out from where they oughtn't to be.

"I'm not falling apart, if that's your concern," Ratchet answered, frowning as he scrubbed gently at a clot that'd gotten lodged between components for his screwdriver and the trigger mechanism on the gun.

"I could say the same of half a dozen patients at this point."

"Only half a dozen?" he murmured, with absolute disinterest.

His brother's engine whined in exasperation. "Ratchet, you _can't_ just keep – "

"I'm fine."

Flashflare vented. "Of course you are," he said, resignedly, as he reformed his scanner back into his hand, and flexed his fingers. But he nudged Ratchet with a shoulder guard and said: "Look, I've got to take a turn on surgical. You want to talk, though, comm me."

Ratchet gave a non-committal rumble, and continued fussing at the dirt and minor damage. He didn't comm.

Another three days passed. Ratchet watched the daily fatality count drop to zero. Everyone was holding steady at last; parts were being recycled, were getting shipped out and finding their way into bodies that needed them, and the 'bots themselves were finding their way back to their barracks and squads and out of the wards. The tension on the base relaxed appreciably.

So it was only a matter of time before Flicksaw called him in to discuss ward five.

"We'll skip the complaints from Logistics," the CMO told him without preamble as the two of them crossed the threshold of the senior medical officers' workroom. "Consider yourself reprimanded for flagrant violation of protocol. I'll be adding a week of salvage to your duties – not that you'll know the difference given all our schedules for the next month!"

"Yes, sir," Ratchet replied, dutifully.

Flicksaw vented, engine churning with irritation as he surveyed the room, which still showed signs of projects hastily abandoned when the call had come in ten days ago. But then with a shake that rattled his armor, he settled himself at his console, and motioned for Ratchet to sit as well. When he had, he continued:

"Instead, we'll focus on the complaint from the MPs." He tapped a panel and a report that had the MP's insignia on it lit up on its holo-screen. The text on the screen was oriented to Flicksaw, not that that presented any great difficulty to a species with trans-scanning technology. Nevertheless, Flicksaw reoriented it to Ratchet, though he didn't give him but a moment even to glance at it.

"I cannot disagree with it, nor with the assessments of several of the sergeants I've had review your report and the recordings from ward five," Flicksaw informed him, canting an optical ridge. "You're not expert enough to refuse to take a lethal approach. If you couldn't accept that, you should have let the MPs handle Barrage."

Well, at least that was refreshingly direct, a point Ratchet could appreciate in light of Jazz, even if he really wanted nothing more at the moment than to vent – _hard_.

"Sir, with all due respect to the MPs and their concerns, the risk was not so unreasonable," he argued instead. "Barrage was injured and disoriented: half his targeting – "

" – was trained on you, as the nearest threat."

"He didn't kill me," Ratchet said urgently.

"The _point_ ," Flicksaw replied, oppressively, "is not that Barrage didn't kill you. The point is that all you had on your side was luck. You had no back-up plan, no support, no real control. And you were working triage! You didn't even have a medically defensible rationale: your own report listed Quickstart as code one and deteriorating when you reached him."

At that, Ratchet just looked away, and clamped down tightly on a rather sharp retort which would have gotten him another black mark, undoubtedly, and probably sent down the ranks to tech grade and a refresher in triage protocols.

Always assuming, of course, that Flicksaw didn't simply cut him loose entirely.

"I take it that you will not contest the reprimand, then," the CMO said to his silence after a few moments.

"No, sir, I will not."

Flicksaw rumbled at that, but there was a dissatisfied note to it. "You will not contest, but don't in fact agree," he read that response, and cocked his head at Ratchet, seeming somewhere between incomprehension and amazement. "He was a code _one_ , Ratchet – "

"Sir, I had no other patients," he cut his superior off – rather to Flicksaw's surprise, to judge by the flash of his eyes. "Not 'til Amtek got hit. And had he not been hooked up to Quickstart, he would've been a stable code three, even with the damage."

"And I repeat: Quickstart was a code one, so why didn't you strip parts from him and use them on Amtek?" Flicksaw demanded.

"Because this is a back-line ERB, sir, not a designated front-line combat zone, and Quickstart had fifteen years of military experience that the next 'bot off the line will not have."

"So you put Amtek in worse jeopardy based on the fact that no one had designated ward five a front-line combat zone?" his superior concluded, clearly incredulous.

"I kept him in life support capacity despite the risk to himself because designated combat zone or not, ward five was a fully equipped emergency repair ward set among five other fully equipped emergency repair wards, and we need every medical hand we can save," Ratchet replied.

"An admirable justification, though one hardly consonant with the fact that had Barrage managed to take that point blank shot, you would've lost us _two_ medics," his commanding officer said pointedly.

"As I said, sir, the risk wasn't as high as it might appear."

"That's your tactical assessment?" The archness of this question wasn't lost on Ratchet, who shot back with perhaps more force than was warranted from a third grade surgeon to the CMO of the entire Autobot corps:

"No, sir. It's my _medical_ assessment."

Flicksaw stared at him, eyes ablaze with Ratchet dared not guess what feeling, but he stared right back, unwilling to give any ground. Not when he'd already said he wouldn't contest the official assessment. The CMO continued to watch him awhile longer, then gave a low rumble, and said:

"So noted."

The way he said it – perfect monotone – it was impossible to tell whether that was a good or a bad thing, and Ratchet, having perhaps stepped back from the cliff's edge, decided not to push his luck any further by asking. So: "Thank you," was all he said. Then: "If that's all, sir...?"

"Not quite." Flicksaw flicked his lights on, and Ratchet felt a scan crawl over his plating as the other scrutinized him. "How's your arm?"

"A little stiff," Ratchet replied, but then shrugged. "It's giving me no trouble I've not had before."

"But it still does trouble you?" 

Ratchet was silent a moment, considering this, and considering, in fact, that he really hadn't had any difficulties that he couldn't blame on exhaustion exacerbating matters. The past few days, in fact...

"Not as often," he said, frowning a bit, feeling a thrill of surprise. "I think... I think I'm improving."

Flicksaw grunted. "I hear," he said at length, vents fluttering just a bit, "that you've been speaking with Jazz."

Ratchet, who had still been mulling the implications of the possibility that finally he might be getting back to normal functioning, now stared at his superior, puzzled by this non-sequitur and also vaguely alarmed, though he'd no idea why. Maybe it was the look Flicksaw was giving him; or maybe it was just the name _Jazz_... "We've spoken once, after the battle," he confirmed, though he also added: "I didn't contact him, he just... appeared."

"Yes, he does do that," Flicksaw growled, sounding displeased. "I assume someone gave you the access code to his medical file – the part of it that isn't classified for special ops?" And when Ratchet hesitated, the CMO flared his vents. " _Everyone_ in medicalreads Jazz's file; it's not a leading question."

"I've seen it," Ratchet admitted, though he did not name his source; Flicksaw was clearly agitated about something, and Ratchet found he didn't fully trust his mood.

"Then you know to stay clear of him – especially after your first meeting, you don't need to invite him to make problems for you."

Ratchet cocked his head. There was something more there, he thought, but for the life of him, he didn't know what. Flicksaw was staring at him now with an indecipherable light to his eyes, but it made Ratchet uneasy. Not that he doubted a word the CMO had said, but...

"He wasn't making problems for me. He... " Ratchet hesitated, all to well aware of his own suspicions, but feeling, for whatever reason, compelled to charity. "He seemed to want to be... helpful."

"Tell that to the last of his victims," Flicksaw muttered, but then waved away his own comment to warn: " _Don't_ take him at his word, and _don't_ let him feed you rumors. Half of what he says is a lie anyway."

"He's special ops."

"And if he weren't, he'd be wiped and reformatted to a more stable personality inside of an hour. For that matter, if Optronix didn't claim him, we'd do it anyway," the CMO vented.

"Is he truly that valuable, to let Optronix have that much discretion with him after so many demerits?" Ratchet ventured to ask, for admittedly, he had wondered. Flicksaw's plating flexed outward a bit, as if he'd gotten something unpleasant and staticky caught in his coils, but then his engine gave a resigned little growl.

"Jazz is, unfortunately, quite as good as he thinks he is, at least when Optronix has disposal of him." The CMO shook himself, then pinned Ratchet with a look: "He gives you problems, you get someone else to deal with him, clear? I don't need my staff getting jailed or injured for his amusement."

"Yes, sir."

"You've got enough of a gradient to climb if you want that combat medic rating," Flicksaw stressed; "Don't let him blow your chances for you on one of his schemes."

As advice, there was nothing objectionable to it,

"I've no interest in his games," he assured his superior, though not without a stab of unease. He was well aware that Jazz still had a hook laid in him, however tenuous, and he'd no notion where its line led or why. Or when Jazz would choose to pull it.But that was Jazz's affair – he wasn't pursuing, and he certainly had no plans to take up his bizarre offer. "Is that all, sir?"

Flicksaw waved him tiredly away. "Dismissed."

But once Ratchet had left, Flicksaw, with an audible grinding of gears, opened a comm line, and put a comm-code through. After a moment, its owner spoke:

"i _Optronix here./_ i"

"Optronix," Flicksaw growled, "I want a word – about Jazz."


End file.
